At Foulshiels, a couple of miles farther down, by the roadside stand the walls of the modest dwelling in which was born Mungo Park, the famous African explorer of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, a man of whom another traveller of our own day, himself among the greatest, has said: "For actual hardship undergone, for dangers faced, and difficulties overcome, together with an exhibition of the virtues which make a man great in the rude battle of life, Mungo Park stands without a rival." His dauntless spirit stands out conspicuous in the last words he ever sent home: "Though the Europeans who were with me were dead, and though I myself were half dead, I would still persevere, and if I could not succeed in the object of my journey, I would at last die on the Niger." That, I think, is the same fearless spirit that has so recently touched to the core the inmost heart of the Nation, the spirit displayed in the last message home of another dauntless explorer and his comrades, who have perished also for duty's sake. But Park was less heard of then--more than a century back; news filtered slowly in those days; he did not at the moment become a national hero. And if a man is seldom a prophet in his own country, it is surely from members of his own family that he is apt last of all to receive the honour which is his due. When Mungo came home in 1797 from his first African expedition, his elder brother, then tenant of Foulshiels, ("a man," says Lockhart, "remarkable for strength both of mind and body,") chanced to be in Selkirk when the explorer arrived there. That night, as the worthy farmer lay asleep in bed, he was awakened by his mother, who told him to get up; there was "a man chappin' (knocking) at the door." "Oh, ay!" drowsily muttered the disturbed sleeper, weary from a long day passed at the market, turning himself over in {315}bed, "I daursay that'll be oor Munga. I saw him gettin' aff the coach in Selkirk the day." [Illustration: 0335] It was this Archibald Park who was riding one day with Sir Walter Scott--"the Shirra"--. when, in a desolate part of the country, they came unexpectedly on a desperate gang of gipsies, one of whom was "wanted" for murder. Park did not hesitate an instant, but seized the man and dragged him away from under the very noses of his lawless, threatening comrades.