the grey savage
eyes--civil questions--half-savage answers--village's name
Achaluarach--the neighbourhood--all Catholic--chiefly
Macdonnels; said the English, _my countrymen_, had taken the
whole country--'but not without paying for it,' I replied--said
I was soaking wet with a kind of sneer, but never asked me in.
I said I cared not for wet. A savage, brutal Papist and a hater
of the English--the whole family with bad countenances--a tall
woman in the background probably the mother of them all. Bade
him good-day, he made no answer and I went away. Learnt that
the river's name was Spean.

He passed through Scotland in a disputative vein, which could not have
made him a popular traveller. He tells a Roman Catholic of the Macdonnel
clan to read his Bible and 'trust in Christ, not in the Virgin Mary and
graven images.' He went up to another man who accosted him with the
remark that 'It is a soft day,' and said, 'You should not say a "soft"
day, but a wet day.' Even the Spanish, for whom he had so much contempt
and scorn when he returned from the Peninsula, are 'in many things a
wise people'--after his experiences of the Scots. There is abundance of
Borrow's prejudice, intolerance, and charm in this fragment of a
diary[194]; but the extract I have given is of additional interest as
showing how Borrow wrote all his books. The notebooks that he wrote in
Spain and Wales were made up of similar disjointed jottings. Here is a
note of more human character interspersed with Borrow's diatribes upon
the surliness of the Scots. He is at Invergarry, on the Banks of Loch
Oich. It is the 5th of October:

Dinner of real haggis; meet a conceited schoolmaster. This
night, or rather in the early morning, I saw in the dream of my
sleep my dear departed mother--she appeared to be coming out of
her little sleeping-room at Oulton Hall--overjoyed I gave a
cry and fell down at her knee, but my agitation was so great
that it burst the bonds of sleep, and I awoke.

But the letters to Mrs. Borrow are the essential documents here, and not
the copious diaries which I hope to publish elsewhere. The first letter
to 'Carreta' is from Edinburgh, where Borrow arrived on Sunday, 19th
September 1858:

To Mrs. George Borrow, 38 Camperdown Place, Yarmouth, Norfolk

EDINBURGH, _Sunday (Sept. 19th, 1858)._

DEAR CARRETA,--I just write a line to inform you tha