have a store of your own. Mackenzie's people will pay you
three hundred pounds a year, and when you get a store you'll
get a percentage on sales. It lies with you to open up new trade
among the natives. I hear that Blaauw - something or other, is
in the far north of the Transvaal, and I see from the map that
it is in a wild, hilly country. You may find gold or diamonds
up there, and come back and buy Portincross House.' My
uncle rubbed his hands and smiled cheerily.

Truth to tell I was both pleased and sad. If a learned
profession was denied me I vastly preferred a veld store to an
Edinburgh office stool. Had I not been still under the shadow
of my father's death I might have welcomed the chance of new
lands and new folk. As it was, I felt the loneliness of an exile.
That afternoon I walked on the Braid Hills, and when I saw in
the clear spring sunlight the coast of Fife, and remembered
Kirkcaple and my boyish days, I could have found it in me to
sit down and cry.

A fortnight later I sailed. My mother bade me a tearful
farewell, and my uncle, besides buying me an outfit and paying
my passage money, gave me a present of twenty sovereigns.
'You'll not be your mother's son, Davie,' were his last words,
'if you don't come home with it multiplied by a thousand.' I
thought at the time that I would give more than twenty
thousand pounds to be allowed to bide on the windy shores of Forth.


I sailed from Southampton by an intermediate steamer, and
went steerage to save expense. Happily my acute homesickness