and so much singing and dancing, that little opportunity was left for his energetic conversation. He seemed sensible of this; for when I told him how happy they were at having him there, he said, 'Yet we have not been able to entertain them much.'" The weather, which had been very wet and stormy, cleared up on the morning of September 12. "Though it was Sunday," says Johnson, "we thought it proper to snatch the opportunity of a calm day." A row of some five or six miles brought them to Portree in Skye, a harbour whose name commemorated the visit of King James V. The busy little town on the top of the cliff, with its
Portree Harbour.
Court House, hotels, banks, and shops, which has grown up at the end of the land-locked harbour, did not then exist. Sir James Macdonald, "the Marcellus of Scotland," as Boswell called him, had intended to build a village there, but by his untimely death the design had come to nothing. There seems to have been little more than the public-house at which the travellers dined. "It was," Johnson believed, "the only one of the island." He forgot, however, as Boswell pointed out to him when he read his narrative, another at Sconser, and a third at Dunvegan. "These," Boswell adds, "are the only inns properly so called. There are many huts where whisky is sold."[1] On the evening which I spent at Portree,
- ↑ Croker's Boswell, p. 826.
