nd in visits to the
neighborhood. He had a consultation with Professor Syme as to a surgical
operation recommended for an ailment that had troubled him ever since
his first great journey; he was strongly urged to have the operation
performed, and probably it would have been better if he had; but he
finally declined, partly because an old medical friend was against it,
but chiefly, as he told Sir* Roderick, because the matter would get into
the newspapers, and he did not like the public to be speaking of his
infirmities. On the 17th he went to Inveraray to visit the Duke of
Argyll. He was greatly pleased with his reception, and his Journal
records the most trifling details. What especially charmed him was the
considerate forethought in making him feel at his ease. "On Monday
morning I had the honor of planting two trees beside those planted by
Sir John Lawrence and the Marquis of Lansdowne, and by the Princess of
Prussia and the Crown Prince. The coach came at twelve o'clock, and I
finished the most delightful visit I ever made."

Next day he went to Oban, and the day after by steamer to Iona and
Staffa, and thereafter to Aros, in Mull. Next day Captain Greenhill took
him in his yacht to Ulva.

"In 1848 the kelp and potatoes failed, and the proprietor, a writer from
Stirling, reduced the population from six hundred to one hundred. None
of my family remain. The minister, Mr. Fraser, had made inquiries some
years ago, and found an old woman who remembered my grandfather living
at Uamh, or the Cave. It is a sheltered spot, with basaltic rocks
jutting out of the ground below the cave; the walls of the house remain,
and the corn and potato patches are green, but no one lives there...."

Returning to Oban on the 24th August, "... I then came to the Crinan
Canal, and at Glasgow end thereof met that famous missionary, Dr. Duff,
from India A fine, tall, noble-looking man, with a white beard and a
twitch in his muscles which shows that the Indian climate has done its
work on him.... Home to Hamilton."

The Highlanders everywhere claimed him; "they cheered me," he writes to
Sir Roderick, "as a man and a brother."

The British Association was to meet at Bath this autumn, and Livingstone
was to give a lecture on Africa. It was a dreadful thought. "Worked at
my Bath speech. A cold shiver comes over me when I think of it. Ugh!"
Then he went with his daughter Agnes to see a beautiful sight, the
launching of a Turkish frigate from M