said to have taken much real
pleasure, like Shakespeare at Stratford, in mingling again with the
simple old folk who were about him in his youth, and he had a few
neighbours whose pursuits corresponded more nearly with his own. James
Oswald, indeed, was now struck down with illness--"terrible distress"
is Smith's expression--and he died in the second year after Smith's
return to Scotland. Oswald spent some months in Kirkcaldy, however, in
the fall of 1767, and probably again in 1768. One of Smith's other
literary neighbours, whom he saw much of during this eleven years'
residence in Fife, was Robert Beatson, author of the _Political Index_
and other works, to whom there will be occasion to refer again later
on. His chief resource, however, throughout this period was his work,
which engaged his mind late and early till it told hard, as we shall
presently see, on his health.

After being established in Kirkcaldy for some weeks Smith wrote Hume
that he was immersed in study, which was the only business he had,
that his sole amusements were long solitary walks by the seaside
(which, with a man of his gift or infirmity of abstraction, would only
be protractions of the study that preoccupied him), and that he never
was happier or more contented in all his life. The immediate object of
this letter, as so usual with Smith, was to serve a friend--a motive
which never failed to overcome his aversion to writing. A French
friend--"the best and most agreeable friend I had in France," says
Smith--was then in London, and Smith wishes Hume, who was now Under
Secretary of State, to show him some attentions during his residence
there. This friend was Count de Sarsfield, a gentleman of Irish
extraction, an associate of Turgot and the other men of letters in
Paris, and a man who added to almost universal knowledge a special
predilection for economics, and indeed wrote a number of essays on
economic questions, though he never published any of them. He seems to
have really been, as Smith indicates, the perfection of an agreeable
companion. John Adams, the second President of the United States, when
envoy for that country in Paris, was very intimate with him, and says
that Sarsfield was the happiest man he knew, for he led the life of a
peripatetic philosopher. "Observation and reflection are all his
business, and his dinner and his friend all his pleasure. If a man
were born for himself alone, I would take him for a model."[201] He
was "th