ook--_Penquite and Pentyre_--and the Scots book never saw the light. In
these autumn months of 1858 geniality and humour had parted from Borrow;
this his diary makes clear. He was ill. His wife urged a tour in
Scotland, and he prepared himself for a rough, simple journey, of a kind
quite different from the one in Wales. The north of Scotland in the
winter was scarcely to be thought of for his wife and stepdaughter
Henrietta. He tells us in one of these diaries that he walked 'several
hundred miles in the Highlands.' His wife and daughter were with him in
Wales, as every reader of _Wild Wales_ will recall, but the Scots tour
was meant to be a more formidable pilgrimage, and they went to Great
Yarmouth instead. The first half of the tour--that of September--is
dealt with in letters to his wife, the latter half is reflected in his
diary. The letters show Borrow's experiences in the earlier part of his
journey, and from his diaries we learn that he was in Oban on 22nd
October, Aberdeen on 5th November, Inverness on the 9th, and thence he
went to Tain, Dornoch, Wick, John o'Groat's, and to the island towns,
Stromness, Kirkwall, and Lerwick. He was in Shetland on the 1st of
December--altogether a bleak, cheerless journey, we may believe, even
for so hardy a tramp as Borrow, and the tone of the following extract
from one of his rough notebooks in my possession may perhaps be
explained by the circumstance. Borrow is on the way to Loch Laggan and
visits a desolate churchyard, Coll Harrie, to see the tomb of John
Macdonnel or Ian Lom:

I was on a Highland hill in an old Popish burying-ground. I
entered the ruined church, disturbed a rabbit crouching under
an old tombstone--it ran into a hole, then came out running
about like wild--quite frightened--made room for it to run out
by the doorway, telling it I would not hurt it--went out again
and examined the tombs.... Would have examined much more but
the wind and rain blew horribly, and I was afraid that my hat,
if not my head, would be blown into the road over the hill.
Quitted the place of old Highland Popish devotion--descended
the hill again with great difficulty--grass slippery and the
ground here and there quaggy, resumed the road--village--went
to the door of house looking down the valley--to ask its
name--knock--people came out, a whole family, looking sullen
and all savage. The stout, tall young man with