should be asked what we must pay her:  she, who perhaps had never before sold anything but cattle, knew not, I believe, well what to ask, and referred herself to us:  we obliged her to make some demand, and one of the Highlanders settled the account with her at a shilling.  One of the men advised her, with the cunning that clowns never can be without, to ask more; but she said that a shilling was enough.  We gave her half a crown, and she offered part of it again.  The Macraes were so well pleased with our behaviour, that they declared it the best day they had seen since the time of the old Laird of Macleod, who, I suppose, like us, stopped in their valley, as he was travelling to Skye....

I cannot forbear to interrupt my narrative.  Boswell, with some of his troublesome kindness, has informed this family and reminded me that the 18th of September is my birthday.  The return of my birthday, if I remember it, fills me with thoughts which it seems to be the general care of humanity to escape.  I can now look back upon three score and four years, in which little has been done, and little has been enjoyed; a life diversified by misery, spent part in the sluggishness of penury, and part under the violence of pain, in gloomy discontent or importunate distress.  But perhaps I am better than I should have been if I had been less afflicted.  With this I will try to be content.

In proportion as there is less pleasure in retrospective considerations, the mind is more disposed to wander forward into futurity; but at sixty-four what promises, however liberal, of imaginary good can futurity venture to make?  Yet something will be always promised and some promises will always be credited.  I am hoping and I am praying that I may live better in the time to come, whether long or short, than I have yet lived, and in the solace of that hope endeavour to repose.  Dear Queeny’s day is next, I hope she at sixty-four will have less to regret....

You will now expect that I should give you some account of the Isle of Skye, of which, though I have been twelve days upon it, I have little to say.  It is an island perhaps fifty miles long, so much indented by inlets of the sea that there is no part of it removed from the water more than six miles.  No part that I have seen is plain; you are always climbing or descending, and every step is upon rock or mire.  A walk upon ploughed ground in England is a dance upon carpets compared to the toilsome drudgery of wandering in Skye.  There is neither town nor village in the island, nor have I seen any house but Macleod’s, that is not much below your habitation at Brighthelmstone.  In the mountains there are stags and roebucks, but no hares, and few rabbits; nor have I seen anything that interested me as a zoologist, except an otter, bigger than I thought an otter could have been.