Inverness was the climax of discomfort, coarseness and dulness, as well as a centre of disaffection. Quarters there in those days must have been something like quarters in an Indian village, with the Scotch climate superadded. The houses were hovels, worse and more fetid than those at Perth. Even when it was fine there was no amusement but shooting woodcocks at the risk of rheumatism. When the rains poured down and the roads were broken up there was no society, not even a newspaper, nothing to be done but to eat coarse food and sleep in bad beds. If there was a laird in the neighbourhood he was apt to be some 'Bumper John' whose first act of hospitality was to make you drunk. "I wonder how long a man moderately inclined that way would require in a place like this to wear out his love for arms and soften his martial spirit. I believe the passion would be something diminished in less than ten years and the gentleman be contented to be a little lower than Caesar in the list to get rid of the encumbrance of greatness." It is in his dreary quarters at Inverness at the dead of night perhaps with a Highland tempest howling outside that the future conqueror of Quebec thus moralizes on his own condition and prospects in a letter to his mother: "The winter wears away, so do our years and so does life itself, and it matters little where a man passes his days and what station he fills or whether he be great or considerable but it imports him something to look to his manner of life. This day am I twenty five years of age, and all that time is as nothing. When I am fifty (if it so happens) and look back, it will be the same, and so on to the last hour. But it is worth a moment's consideration that one may be called away on a sudden unguarded and unprepared, and the oftener these thoughts are entertained the less will be the dread or fear of death. You will judge by this sort of discourse that it is the dead of night when all is quiet and at rest, and one of those intervals wherein men think of what they really are and what they really should be, how much is expected and how little performed. Our short duration here and the doubts of the hereafter should awe the most flagitious, if they reflected on them. The little taken in for meditation is the best employed in all their lives for if the uncertainty of our state and being is then brought before us who is there that will not immediately discover the inconsistency of all his behaviour and the vanity of all his pursuits? And yet, we are so mixed and compounded that, though I think seriously this minute, and lie down with good intentions, it is likely I may rise with my old nature, or perhaps with the addition of some new impertinence, and be the same wandering lump of idle errors that I have ever been.