Page:Footsteps of Dr. Johnson.djvu/283

Rh window the rain had driven in and turned the floor to mud. He thus describes his night's lodging:—"The house and the furniture are not always nicely suited. We were driven once, by missing a passage, to the hut of a gentleman where, after a very liberal supper, when I was conducted to my chamber, I found an elegant bed of Indian cotton, spread with fine sheets. The accommodation was flattering; I undressed myself, and felt my feet in the mire. The bed stood upon the bare earth which a long course of rain had softened to a puddle."

Our travellers having stayed but one night at Ulva, on the morning of Sunday, October 17, took boat and rowed to Inchkenneth, "an island about a mile long, and perhaps half a mile broad, remarkable for pleasantness and fertility. It is verdant and grassy, and fit both for pasture and tillage; but it has no trees." The only inhabitants were "the chief of the ancient and numerous clan of Macleane, his daughter and their servants." In a letter to Mrs. Thrale Johnson says: "Sir Allan, a chieftain, a baronet, and a soldier, inhabits in this insulated desert a thatched hut with no chambers. He received us with the soldier's frankness and the gentleman's elegance, and introduced us to his daughters, two young ladies who have not wanted education suitable to their birth, and who in their cottage neither forgot their dignity nor affected to remember it. His affairs are in disorder by the fault of his ancestors, and while he forms some scheme for retrieving them, he has retreated hither." By chambers, Johnson seems to mean rooms on an upper floor. Boswell describes the habitation as commodious, "though it consisted but of a few small buildings only one story high." In two of these huts were the servants' rooms and the kitchen. "The dinner was plentiful and delicate. Neither the comforts nor the elegancies of life were wanting. There were several dishes and variety of liquors." Sir Walter Scott many years later visited the island in company with a Gloucestershire baronet, Sir George Onesiphorus Paul:

"He seemed to me," writes Sir Walter, "to suspect many of the Highland tales which he heard, but he showed most incredulity on the subject of Johnson's having been entertained in the wretched huts of which we saw the ruins. He took me aside,