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162 Johnson, stout-hearted though he was. "I believe," he says, "they were without any evil intention, but they had a very savage wildness of aspect and manner." My friend, the minister of Glen Shiel, pointed out to me that it was no doubt mere curiosity which brought them round him. Johnson was as strange a sight to them as they were to Johnson. An earlier traveller in the Hebrides has expressed this very well. "Every man and thing I met with," he writes, "seemed a novelty. I thought myself entering upon a new scene of nature, but nature rough and unpolished. Men, manners, habits, buildings, everything different from our own; and if we thought them rude and barbarous, no doubt the people had the same opinion of what belonged to us, and the wonder was mutual."

Auchnasheal has been swept away; nothing of it is left but a few banks of earth and the foundations of the one stone house. The same fate has befallen it which befell that other village near Fort Augustus where Coleridge heard a Highland widow mourn over the desolation of the land:

The desolation had already begun even at the time of our travellers' visit. Their host of the evening before was following seventy of the dalesmen to America, whither they had been driven by a rack-renting landlord. "I asked, him," writes Johnson, "whether they would stay at home if they were well-treated. He answered with indignation, that no man willingly left his native country."

Taking leave of these inoffensive, if wild-looking people, our travellers rode on, much refreshed by their repast. They had, as Johnson complained, "very little entertainment, as they travelled