were eminently in harmony with his truthful, unexaggerating
nature, and showed that he neither wrote nor spoke for effect, but
simply to utter truth. What made his work of composition irksome was, on
the one hand, the fear that he was not doing it well, and on the other,
the necessity of doing it quickly. He had always a dread that his
English was not up to the critical mark, and yet he was obliged to hurry
on, and leave the English as it dropped from his pen. He had no time to
plan, to shape, to organize; the architectural talent could not be
brought into play. Add to this that he had been so accustomed to
open-air life and physical exercise, that the close air and sedentary
attitude of the study must have been exceedingly irksome; so that it is
hardly less wonderful that his health stood the confinement of
book-making in England, than that it survived the tear and wear, labor
and sorrow, of all his journeys in Africa.

An extract from a letter to Mr. Maclear, on the eve of his beginning his
book (21st January, 1857), will show how his thoughts were running:

"I begin to-morrow to write my book, and as I have a large
party of men (110) waiting for me at Tette, and I promised to
join them in April next, you will see I shall have enough to
do to get over my work here before the end of the month....
Many thanks for all the kind things you said at the Cape Town
meeting. Here they laud me till I shut my eyes, for only
trying to do my duty. They ought to vote thanks to the Boers
who set me free to discover the fine new country. They were
determined to shut the country, and I was determined to open
it. They boasted to the Portuguese that they had expelled two
missionaries, and outwitted themselves rather. I got the gold
medal, as you predicted, and the freedom of the town of
Hamilton, which insures me protection from the payment of
jail fees if put in prison!"

In writing his book, he sometimes worked in the house of a friend, but
generally in a London or suburban lodging, often with his children about
him, and all their noise; for, as in the Blantyre mill, he could
abstract his attention from sounds of whatever kind, and go on calmly
with his work. Busy though he was, this must have been one of the
happiest times in his life. Some of his children still remember his
walks and romps with them in the Barnet woods, near which they lived
part of the time--ho