of my father's death I might have
welcomed the chance of new lands and new folk. As it was, I felt the
loneliness of an exile. That afternoon I walked on the Braid Hills, and
when I saw in the clear spring sunlight the coast of Fife, and
remembered Kirkcaple and my boyish days, I could have found it in me to
sit down and cry.

A fortnight later I sailed. My mother bade me a tearful farewell, and
my uncle, besides buying me an outfit and paying my passage money, gave
me a present of twenty sovereigns. 'You'll not be your mother's son,
Davie,' were his last words, 'if you don't come home with it multiplied
by a thousand.' I thought at the time that I would give more than
twenty thousand pounds to be allowed to bide on the windy shores of
Forth.

I sailed from Southampton by an intermediate steamer, and went steerage
to save expense. Happily my acute homesickness was soon forgotten in
another kind of malady. It blew half a gale before we were out of the
Channel, and by the time we had rounded Ushant it was as dirty weather
as ever I hope to see. I lay mortal sick in my bunk, unable to bear
the thought of food, and too feeble to lift my head. I wished I had
never left home, but so acute was my sickness that if some one had
there and then offered me a passage back or an immediate landing on
shore I should have chosen the latter.

It was not till we got into the fair-weather seas around Madeira that I
recovered enough to sit on deck and observe my fellow-passengers.
There were some fifty of us in the steerage, mostly wives and children
going to join relations, with a few emigrant artisans and farmers. I
early found a friend in a little man with a yellow beard and
spectacles, who sat down beside me and remarked on the weather in a
strong Scotch accent. He turned out to be a Mr Wardlaw from Aberdeen,
who was going out to be a schoolmaster. He was a man of good
education, who had taken a university degree, and had taught for some
years as an under-master in a school in his native town. But the east
winds had damaged his lungs, and he had been glad to take the chance of
a poorly paid country school in the veld. When I asked him where he
was going I was amazed to be told, 'Blaauwildebeestefontein.'

Mr Wardlaw was a pleasant little man, with a sharp tongue but a
cheerful temper. He laboured all day at primers of the Dutch and
Kaffir languages, but in the evening after supper he would walk with me
on the after-