After my return from Washington reaction followed and I was taken with my first serious illness.  I was completely broken down, and after a struggle to perform my duties was compelled to seek rest.  One afternoon, when on the railway line in Virginia, I had experienced something like a sunstroke, which gave me considerable trouble.  It passed off, however, but after that I found I could not stand heat and had to be careful to keep out of the sun—­a hot day wilting me completely. [That is the reason why the cool Highland air in summer has been to me a panacea for many years.  My physician has insisted that I must avoid our hot American summers.]

Leave of absence was granted me by the Pennsylvania Railroad Company, and the long-sought opportunity to visit Scotland came.  My mother, my bosom friend Tom Miller, and myself, sailed in the steamship Etna, June 28, 1862, I in my twenty-seventh year; and on landing in Liverpool we proceeded at once to Dunfermline.  No change ever affected me so much as this return to my native land.  I seemed to be in a dream.  Every mile that brought us nearer to Scotland increased the intensity of my feelings.  My mother was equally moved, and I remember, when her eyes first caught sight of the familiar yellow bush, she exclaimed: 

“Oh! there’s the broom, the broom!”

Her heart was so full she could not restrain her tears, and the more I tried to make light of it or to soothe her, the more she was overcome.  For myself, I felt as if I could throw myself upon the sacred soil and kiss it.[22]

[Footnote 22:  “It’s a God’s mercy I was born a Scotchman, for I do not see how I could ever have been contented to be anything else.  The little dour deevil, set in her own ways, and getting them, too, level-headed and shrewd, with an eye to the main chance always and yet so lovingly weak, so fond, so led away by song or story, so easily touched to fine issues, so leal, so true.  Ah! you suit me, Scotia, and proud am I that I am your son.” (Andrew Carnegie, Our Coaching Trip, p. 152.  New York, 1882.)]

In this mood we reached Dunfermline.  Every object we passed was recognized at once, but everything seemed so small, compared with what I had imagined it, that I was completely puzzled.  Finally, reaching Uncle Lauder’s and getting into the old room where he had taught Dod and myself so many things, I exclaimed: 

“You are all here; everything is just as I left it, but you are now all playing with toys.”

The High Street, which I had considered not a bad Broadway, uncle’s shop, which I had compared with some New York establishments, the little mounds about the town, to which we had run on Sundays to play, the distances, the height of the houses, all had shrunk.  Here was a city of the Lilliputians.  I could almost touch the eaves of the house in which I was born, and the sea—­to walk to which on a Saturday had been considered quite a feat—­was only three miles distant.  The rocks at the seashore,