Village Toper--A Reverend
Hellenist--Antigone--Shadows of the Manse--"My Heart's in the
Highlands"--Saddell, Kintyre--Springtime in Perthshire--Dr.
George Macdonald's Creed--Abbotsford--Carlyle--Shelley--Picture
in an Inn--Rain-storm at Loch Awe--Kinlochewe--General
Wade--Sound of Raasay in December--Les Neiges d' Antan--The
Islands of the Ness--American Tourist Loquitur--The Miners--In a
Country Graveyard--No Place like Home.

INDEX, 369

LITERARY TOURING.

CHAPTER I.

INTRODUCTORY.

Village libraries--Difficulties of travel--Literary Societies in
the Highlands--Gaelic books--Happiness and geniality of
natives--Oban to Gairloch--Winter sailing--A crofting
village--Horrors of the Minch--Notes on Lewis--Highland
doctors--Hotels and anglers--Recent books--Military--Moray
Firth--Among the miners--Handloom weaving--Professor Blackie and
the Highlands.

VILLAGE LIBRARIES.

At pretty frequent intervals, during the last four years, I have sallied
forth from my home in Renfrewshire, north, south, east, and west, to
some of the most remote and isolated nooks of insular and provincial
Scotland, on a mission so uncommon as to justify the writing of a book
of impressions and experiences. The Highlands and Islands of Scotland
are, of course, visited every summer by a great host of excursionists,
who go thither to fish, play golf, lounge, climb hills, and otherwise
picturesquely disport themselves. A few earnest devotees of science
spend their holidays botanising in the glens, scanning the geological
strata, looking for fossils, measuring the outlines of brochs and
prehistoric forts, or collecting relics of Culdee churches. My journeys
were undertaken for none of the objects named: they were entirely
connected with _libraries_ and _lecturing_, and, being undertaken mainly
in the months of winter and spring, they have given me the opportunity
of noting a great many interesting particulars that the summer
traveller, bent on recreation or science, cannot be expected to notice.

_I do not think any finer gift could be given to a village community
than a collection of useful and entertaining books._ The libraries with
which my work was connected were sent, free of charge, to strath and
glen, and nothing was asked in return, except that the volumes should be
well housed and delivered to the people t