And now, my dear mother, I found sufficient to reconcile me to all my follies; for here I spent three whole days.  The counsellor had two sweet girls to his daughters, who played enchantingly on the harpsichord; and yet it was but a melancholy pleasure I felt the first time I heard them:  for that being the first time also that either of them had touched the instrument since their mother’s death, I saw the tears in silence trickle down their father’s cheeks.  I every day endeavoured to go away, but every day was pressed and obliged to stay.  On my going, the counsellor offered me his purse, with a horse and servant to convey me home; but the latter I declined, and only took a guinea to bear my necessary expenses on the road.

TO ROBERT BRYANTON

In Scotland

Edinburgh, 26 Sept. 1753

MY DEAR BOB,

How many good excuses (and you know I was ever good at an excuse) might I call up to vindicate my past shameful silence!  I might tell how I wrote a long letter on my first coming hither, and seem vastly angry at my not receiving an answer; I might allege that business (with business you know I was always pestered) had never given me time to finger a pen—­but I suppress those and twenty more equally plausible, and as easily invented, since they might be attended with a slight inconvenience of being known to be lies.  Let me then speak truth.  An hereditary indolence (I have it from the mother’s side) has hitherto prevented my writing to you, and still prevents my writing at least twenty-five letters more, due to my friends in Ireland.  No turnspit dog gets up into his wheel with more reluctance than I sit down to write; yet no dog ever loved the roast meat he turns better than I do him I now address.  Yet what shall I say now I’m entered?  Shall I tire you with a description of this unfruitful country; where I must lead you over their hills all brown with heath, or their valleys scarce able to feed a rabbit?  Man alone seems to be the only creature who has arrived to the natural size in this poor soil.  Every part of the country presents the same dismal landscape.  No grove, nor brook, lend their music to cheer the stranger, or make the inhabitants forget their poverty.  Yet with all these disadvantages, enough to call him down to humility, the Scotchman is one of the proudest things alive.  The poor have pride ever ready to relieve them.  If mankind should happen to despise them, they are masters of their own admiration; and that they can plentifully bestow upon themselves.

From their pride and poverty, as I take it, results one advantage this country enjoys; namely, the gentlemen here are much better bred than amongst us.  No such characters here as our fox-hunters; and they have expressed great surprise when I informed them that some men in Ireland of one thousand pounds a-year spend their whole lives in running after a hare, and drinking to be drunk; and truly, if such a being, equipped in his hunting dress, came among a circle of Scotch gentry, they would behold him with the same astonishment that a countryman would King George on horseback.