We must, therefore, till more convincing proof than hearsay evidence is forthcoming, believe that Mungo Park was a believer in the slave trade. Such a position we can understand and make all due allowance for as the result of the ideas of the time, and of those by whom he was immediately surrounded--to believe else were to place Park on a distinctly lower pedestal than that to which he is entitled by his many meritorious characteristics. Shortly after the publication of the abstract of Park’s narrative, he left London on a visit to his family at Foulshiels, where his mother still lived, though his father had been dead for some years. Here he remained the whole of the summer and autumn of 1798, working assiduously at the narrative of his travels. This was probably anything but an agreeable task to him after the eventful life he had led for three years, and unaccustomed as he was to literary work. But Park was not the man to shirk any work, however irksome, if it in any way appeared to him in the light of a duty. His mornings he devoted to writing, his evenings to strolls along the bank of his much-loved Yarrow, where, rarely troubled by native or by passing stranger, he could undisturbed recall the various events which marked his African wanderings, and on the dreamy rush of the mountain stream let his thoughts glide back to the majestic sweep of the Joliba moving eastward towards its unknown bourne. What hours he must have spent thus, seeking in his mind’s eye to pierce the dark veil which so mysteriously shrouded the great African river beyond Timbuktu, and follow it to its union with the ocean, or its gradual disappearance in the Central Deserts. At times restlessness and a feeling of revolt took possession of him, and then the only charm that could exorcise the demon of unrest within him or soothe his wild vague longings, was a long swift walk among the wild romantic scenery around. Up Yarrow’s winding dale, on the bold front of Newark Hill, or the heathery summit of the Broomy Law, his was the keen pleasure of a soul that knows “a rapture on the lonely shore.” The distant bleat of sheep, the plaintive call of the curlew, and the whirr of grouse, harmonised well with the mood possessing him, and touched his heart with the wild pathos of Nature. Happiest when alone, he found companions in all the sounds around him. The breeze, the rushing stream, the wild calls of bird and beast, all alike spoke to him, and adapted themselves to his every mood. All this may be vaguely discerned by virtue of the gleams of light which have momentarily shot across the darkness of the past, and preserved a blurred though speaking print of the great traveller at home among his native hills.