Here, again, was I struck by the contrast between the past and the present. Of the old inn, with all its magnificence of lime and slate, not even the site is known. In its place stands a roomy and comfortable hotel. It was on the 21st of June when we visited it, and we found it half-asleep and almost empty, for the season had not yet begun. At the most delightful time of the year, when the days were at their longest and no candles were burnt, there was scarcely a single stranger to enjoy the quiet and the beauty. There were woods and flowering shrubs, rhododendrons and the Portugal laurel, and close to the water’s edge the laburnum in full bloom. There were all the sights of peaceful country life—the cocks crowing, the sheep answering with their bleats their bleating lambs, the cows with their calves in the noonday heat seeking the shade of the tall and wide-spreading trees. The waves lapped gently on the shore, and in the distance, below the rocky coast of Skye, the waters were whitened by the countless sea-birds. We drove up a beautiful valley to the Pictish forts, and saw an eagle hovering high above us.
[Illustration: BERNERA BARRACKS, GLENELG.]
On the morning of Thursday, September 2, our travellers took boat at Glenelg, “and launched into one of the straits of the Atlantic Ocean.” Rowing along the Sound of Slate towards the south-west, they reached the shore of Armidale in Skye early in the afternoon. They had intended to visit in his castle the owner of half the island, Sir Alexander Macdonald. But, wrote Johnson, “he had come from his seat in the middle of the island to a small house on the shore, as we believe, that he might with less reproach entertain us meanly.” Boswell was so much disgusted with this chieftain’s parsimony, that he “meditated an escape from his house the very next day; but Dr. Johnson resolved that we should weather it out till Monday.” [Sidenote: CORRICHATACHIN.] When the day of escape at length came, they started on horseback in a north-westerly direction for Corrichatachin, a farm-house near Broadford,[614] belonging to Sir A. Macdonald, but tenanted by a Mackinnon, a clan to which all this district had formerly belonged. “Here they were entertained better than at the landlord’s;” here “they enjoyed the comfort of a table plentifully furnished, and here for the first time they had a specimen of the joyous social manners of the inhabitants of the Highlands.” Books, too, were not wanting, both Latin and English; among them was a copy of the abridgment of Johnson’s Dictionary. He might have said here, as four years later with some eagerness he said at Lord Scarsdale’s, when he discovered the same book in his lordship’s dressing-room, “Quæ regio in terris nostri non plena laboris?” Here, too, he wrote that Latin Ode to Mrs. Thrale, which so caught Sir Walter Scott’s imagination, that when he first set foot on Skye, it was the thing which first came into his thoughts. And here on their return after a lapse of nearly three weeks, Boswell got so tipsy and so piously penitent next day. He had not gone to bed till nearly five o’clock on a Sunday morning, by which time four bowls of punch had been finished.