Notwithstanding the increasing and incessant claims on his time and attention of literature, business, and family duties, there were few, if any, years in which Bute was not able to secure an interval of what to him was real enjoyment, in foreign travel. Even from such journeys--and they were not infrequent--as were undertaken purely for reasons of health, he seldom failed to derive both pleasure and profit. "I am ordered abroad at once," he wrote on one occasion, "to drink the waters of Chales, in Savoy. They are, I believe, exceptionally nasty, but you know how I like being abroad, and I am quite in spirits at the prospect of the trip." He never travelled very far afield, his most distant journeyings having been, perhaps, to Petersburg (in Lord Rosebery's company) and to Teneriffe in 1891. The countries bordering on the Mediterranean, France and Italy, Spain and Portugal, Palestine, Egypt and Greece, were the scenes of most of his foreign sojournings; and in them all he found sources of continual and inexhaustible interest. He had travelled a good deal abroad with his mother in his childhood, and often recalls in his diary these early visits: {157} _July_ 30, 1886. The very same rooms at the Belle Vue, Brussels, as we had when I came here in childhood.... The house is full of Americans, as like one another (to English eyes) as Chinese or negroes. It is impossible to tell them apart.[1] At Dresden also, a few months later, he records his vivid recollections of an early visit to that capital. This was the year of his first pilgrimage to the shrine of Wagner at Bayreuth (he attended the festival there also in 1888 and 1891). Many of his letters to the editor of the _Scottish Review_ are dated from foreign addresses; and interspersed in these with business and literary details are numerous picturesque notes on the customs and doings of the people among whom he was living. The descriptions of the religious observances of the inhabitants of Sorrento have a certain piquancy, when one remembers that they were addressed to a minister of the Scottish Presbyterian Church. Bute wrote on such matters _currente calamo_, and took for granted--no doubt with reason--that his friend would be as much interested in such matters as he was himself. Rome, _February_ 15, 1888.