XXIV.—­To MRS. THRALE.

Ostich in Skie, Sept. 30, 1773.

DEAREST MADAM,—­I am still confined in Skie.  We were unskilful travellers, and imagined that the sea was an open road, which we could pass at pleasure; but we have now learned, with some pain, that we may still wait, for a long time, the caprices of the equinoctial winds, and sit reading or writing, as I now do, while the tempest is rolling the sea, or roaring in the mountains.  I am now no longer pleased with the delay; you can hear from me but seldom, and I cannot at all hear from you.  It comes into my mind, that some evil may happen, or that I might be of use while I am away.  But these thoughts are vain; the wind is violent and adverse, and our boat cannot yet come.  I must content myself with writing to you, and hoping that you will sometime receive my letter.  Now to my narrative.

Sept. 9th.  Having passed the night as is usual, I rose, and found the dining-room full of company; we feasted and talked, and when the evening came it brought musick and dancing.  Young Macleod, the great proprietor of Skie, and head of his clan, was very distinguishable; a young man of nineteen, bred awhile at St. Andrew’s, and afterwards at Oxford, a pupil of G. Strahan.  He is a young man of a mind, as much advanced as I have ever known; very elegant of manners, and very graceful in his person.  He has the full spirit of a feudal chief; and I was very ready to accept his invitation to Dunvegan.  All Raarsa’s children are beautiful.  The ladies, all, except the eldest, are in the morning dressed in their hair.  The true highlander never wears more than a riband on her head, till she is married.

On the third day Boswell went out, with old Malcolm, to see a ruined castle, which he found less entire than was promised, but he saw the country.  I did not go, for the castle was, perhaps, ten miles off, and there is no riding at Raarsa, the whole island being rock or mountain, from which the cattle often fall, and are destroyed.  It is very barren, and maintains, as near as I could collect, about seven hundred inhabitants, perhaps ten to a square mile.  In these countries you are not to suppose that you shall find villages or inclosures.  The traveller wanders through a naked desert, gratified sometimes, but rarely, with the sight of cows, and now and then finds a heap of loose stones and turf, in a cavity between rocks, where a being, born with all those powers which education expands, and all those sensations which culture refines, is condemned to shelter itself from the wind and rain.  Philosophers there are, who try to make themselves believe, that this life is happy; but they believe it only while they are saying it, and never yet produced conviction in a single mind; he whom want of words or images sunk into silence still thought, as he thought before, that privation of pleasure can never please, and that content is not to be much envied, when it has no other principle than ignorance of good.