From Montreal Prof. Geikie went south to Philadelphia, where he found the heat very trying, and then back to New York and on to Boston. The latter town attracted him greatly. “I feel more at home in Boston than I have felt since leaving Auld Reekie. The people are more like our own people too.” Here he met and made many friends, and tells an amusing experience with a German lady doctor, who made wine from grapes grown in her own vineries. She and Prof. Geikie got on very well together, and the latter was invited to visit the vineries and taste the wine. Having received a private warning, the professor resolved to display extreme abstemiousness when confronted with the fluid, but the lady ceremoniously proposed the health of her guest from across the seas, who felt constrained to return the compliment with a brimming goblet. Fortunately the proceedings came to a close soon afterwards, and Prof. Geikie and his friend were able to hurry home to the latter’s house in order to correct the influence of the concoction with a modest “dram.” They took a long drive afterwards, and no results followed, apparently, beyond the acquisition of a conviction that the climate of Boston was unsuited to the juice of the grape. Shortly afterwards Prof. Geikie returned home, and in December he writes to Mr Horne bemoaning the amount of work which he found waiting for him. He says:--“But know one thing, O Horne, that here in Auld Reekie I am pestered to death with correspondence. People scribble on all sorts of subjects, and expect answers, and I begin to hate the sight of notepaper. And so the letters that I ought to write and like to write remain unwritten, while those I detest to write take up more time than I like to waste. You should have seen the piles waiting for me on my return from Yankee land--some of the rubbish is not answered yet.” He goes on in the same letter to say:--“I find living in town more expensive than the country, there are so many calls upon one, and the class does not pay as well as I had hoped. But that is mending and I have good hopes.” He also speaks of a “pot-boiler” he was busy with, to wit, his _Outlines of Geology_, which though far advanced at this time did not appear till more than a year afterwards. The same note occurs in other letters of the following year, and a projected visit to the Hebrides in the summer of 1885 had to be given up owing to “circumstances over which I have no control (_i.e._, empty purse).” “Living here is not so easy as in the country,” he adds again. But he also says:--“I have got into the ways of my new sphere and jog along very comfortably.”