Niger

Once or twice he vanished for several days from
Fowlshiels, the atmosphere stifling, the quiet, the
attentions of his mother, the soft glow and gurgle
of Yarrow maddening. Then what did he want,
where could he go ? And more and more as that
year wore to its close the answer was Ailie .
Sometime in that year he asked her to marry
him, and Ailie ceased to tease, and was grave, and
returned his grave cold kiss. Then he went back
to his unfinished Tvavels and the correspondence
he carried on with Bryan Edwards.
He had written to Edwards and asked him to
help with the complete Travels as with the earlier
abstract. This had now been issued to subscribers
to the African Association, and readers, in the
phrase of a novelist still unquoted, asked for more.
Mungo had now decided that that more he alone
was incapable of supplying with any grace or
intelligibility. He wrote later that not being in
the habit of literary composition, he was obliged
to employ someone to put his manuscript into a
form fit for the public eye ; but that every sheet of
the publication had undergone his strict revision,
and that not only every fact but every sentiment was
his own.5 It was this sentiment which was to
occasion the Abolitionist outcry.
Bryan Edwards was a notorious anti-Abolitionist.
He approved of slavery. How otherwise would the
West Indian plantations be worked ? And his efforts
at combating the propaganda for freeing the slaves
ceaseless : he conceived it as his special
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