Page:Footsteps of Dr. Johnson.djvu/296

232 tained that Pulteney was as paltry a fellow as could be. Continuing their journey on the morrow, they dined at the house of a physician, "who was so much struck with the uncommon conversation of Johnson, that he observed to Boswell, 'This man is just a hogshead of sense.'" This doctor's practice could scarcely have been very lucrative, for there came a time when he had no successor. Garnett writing of Mull at the end of the century, says, "There is at present no medical man in the island; the nearest surgeon of eminence is at Inverary." The distance from that town to the



farthest points in Mull, as the crow flies, is not less than sixty miles, but by the route taken would be perhaps one hundred. In the afternoon our travellers rode, writes Boswell, "through what appeared to me the most gloomy and desolate country I had ever beheld." "It was," said Johnson, "a country of such gloomy desolation that Mr. Boswell thought no part of the Highlands equally terrific." Faujas Saint-Fond, a few years later, describes Mull as a country "without a single road, without a single tree, where the mountains have heather for their only covering." Amidst the beautiful plantations and the fine trees with which this