Niger

however, authentic enough for Mungo s purpose
of meeting the South Saharan Moors in terms of
intelligibility. At the end of three months, with
news from London that the new Secretary was at
last beginning to move in the matter of the expedi¬
tion, Mungo closed down his house at Peebles and
removed his goods, his Ailie and his four children
back to Fowlshiels and the welcome of the greying
Mistress Park.
Here, in those solitudes which had seen the
earliest strayings of his feet, he wandered much
through that autumn, his Arabic grammar in his
hand ; or at home, in the parlour of Fowlshiels,
brooded over those matters of sextant and astronom¬
ical calculation on which he had previously been
so ignorant. Ailie watched him with unswerving
affection, bright and clear always. Now and then he
took to wanderings across the hills on horseback, and
found at the end of a long day the dyspepsia that
had haunted him passing away. The mere thought
of the terrors of Africa braced him as nothing else.
He took to living on the plainest of food in
preparation for the journey, and to remembering
old ways of conserving his life from the dangers of
stream and torrent. Scott one day rode over to the
whinstone cottage and asked for Mungo, and was
told he had gone for a stroll along the Yarrow.
The Sheriff followed him along the rocky path and
presently sighted Mungo, seated, by the edge of the
river, the greying grasses of autumn about him,
dropping large stones into the rush of the Yarrow
271