Johnson was better lodged than Boswell, for he had a room to himself at night, though in the day it was the place where the servants took their meals. Yet he was pleased with the kindness shown him, and discovered no deficiencies. "Our entertainment," he wrote, "was not only hospitable but elegant." The company he describes as being "more numerous and elegant than it could have been supposed easy to collect." He gave as much pleasure as he received, and when he left, "the Scottish phrase of honest man, which is an expression of kindness and regard, was again and again applied to him."
The house he describes as "very pleasantly situated between two brooks, with one of the highest hills of the island behind it." Boswell with good reason remarks on the entire absence of a garden. "Corrichatachin," he writes, "has not even a turnip, a carrot, or a cabbage." Where these were wanting, there would be no roses clustering on the porch, no flower-beds before the door. This scene of hospitality and jovial riot is now a ruin. We walked to it from Broadford across a moorland, the curlews flying round us with their melancholy cry. The two brooks were shrunk with the long drought, and flowed in very quiet streams. Yet one of them, I was told, in a time of flood once broke into Mackinnon's house. We crossed it on a bridge formed of two trees, with a long piece of iron wire for a railing. There we rested awhile, now looking clown at the sunlight dancing in the shallows, and now gazing at the ruined farm and the mountain rising behind in steep crags of barren rock. Far up the valley to the west a flock of sheep was coming white from the shearing, bleating as they spread out along the hill-side. Another flock the dogs were gathering into what had been the yard of the old house. It had been solidly built, two stories high, about thirty-six feet long by fifteen broad in the inside measurements. On the outside, over the door, was carved:
L. M. K.J. M. K.
1747.
