The next few days were spent with his family, and in visits to the neighborhood.  He had a consultation with Professor Syme as to a surgical operation recommended for an ailment that had troubled him ever since his first great journey; he was strongly urged to have the operation performed, and probably it would have been better if he had; but he finally declined, partly because an old medical friend was against it, but chiefly, as he told Sir* Roderick, because the matter would get into the newspapers, and he did not like the public to be speaking of his infirmities.  On the 17th he went to Inveraray to visit the Duke of Argyll.  He was greatly pleased with his reception, and his Journal records the most trifling details.  What especially charmed him was the considerate forethought in making him feel at his ease.  “On Monday morning I had the honor of planting two trees beside those planted by Sir John Lawrence and the Marquis of Lansdowne, and by the Princess of Prussia and the Crown Prince.  The coach came at twelve o’clock, and I finished the most delightful visit I ever made.”

Next day he went to Oban, and the day after by steamer to Iona and Staffa, and thereafter to Aros, in Mull.  Next day Captain Greenhill took him in his yacht to Ulva.

“In 1848 the kelp and potatoes failed, and the proprietor, a writer from Stirling, reduced the population from six hundred to one hundred.  None of my family remain.  The minister, Mr. Fraser, had made inquiries some years ago, and found an old woman who remembered my grandfather living at Uamh, or the Cave.  It is a sheltered spot, with basaltic rocks jutting out of the ground below the cave; the walls of the house remain, and the corn and potato patches are green, but no one lives there....”

Returning to Oban on the 24th August, “...  I then came to the Crinan Canal, and at Glasgow end thereof met that famous missionary, Dr. Duff, from India A fine, tall, noble-looking man, with a white beard and a twitch in his muscles which shows that the Indian climate has done its work on him....  Home to Hamilton.”

The Highlanders everywhere claimed him; “they cheered me,” he writes to Sir Roderick, “as a man and a brother.”

The British Association was to meet at Bath this autumn, and Livingstone was to give a lecture on Africa.  It was a dreadful thought.  “Worked at my Bath speech.  A cold shiver comes over me when I think of it.  Ugh!” Then he went with his daughter Agnes to see a beautiful sight, the launching of a Turkish frigate from Mr. Napier’s yard—­“8000 tons weight plunged into the Clyde, and sent a wave of its dirty water over to the other side.”  The Turkish Ambassador, Musurus Pasha, was one of the party at Shandon, and he and Livingstone traveled in the same carriage At one of the stations they were greatly cheered by the Volunteers.  “The