It was in this not very suitable mood that he was forced to face the fact that he must no longer depend on the vague hope of finding a congenial opening, but must put his hand to something, however alien to his tastes and aspirations. For a time he thought of taking a farm, but at last reluctantly came to the conclusion that his best course would be to resume his profession as a doctor. An opening presented itself in the neighbouring town of Peebles, where he went to reside in the month of October, occupying a house at the head of the Brygate, while his surgery was a small projecting building--since demolished--east from the first Chambers’ Institute. In a lane behind was his humble laboratory. [Illustration: I had a letter from Adam on Monday-last but I suppose by this time he has sailed for India. My compl. to all friends and I remain my lovely Ailie yours ever Mungo Park. London } March 12} 1801 } P.S. write soon for I count the days until your answer comes EXTRACT OF MUNGO PARK’S LETTER TO HIS WIFE.] Park threw himself into his work with characteristic energy and thoroughness, and speedily won for himself a fair share of the practice of the town and country. The profits, however, were of the poorest, and the work of the hardest--so much so, indeed, that he once said to Scott he “would rather brave Africa and all its horrors than wear out his life in long and toilsome rides over cold and lonely heaths and gloomy hills, assailed by the wintry tempest, for which the remuneration was hardly enough to keep soul and body together.” On the strength of this reported offhand remark, Ruskin, without troubling to inquire further into the history of the man, has formulated the following indictment. This “terrific” sentence, he says, “signifies, if you look into it, almost total absence of the instinct of personal duty--total absence of belief in the God who chose for him his cottage birthplace and set him his life task beside it; absolute want of interest in his profession, of sense for natural beauty, and of compassion for the noblest poor of his native land. And with these absences there is the clearest evidence of the fatalist of the vices, Avarice--in the exact form in which it was the ruin of Scott himself--the love of money for the sake of worldly position.” Never was more sweeping accusation founded on more slender data. Practically, Park is charged with absence of a belief in God, and of a sense of duty to his fellows, because he finds his profession toilsome and uncongenial. The argument seems to be that the man is an atheist and a sinner against society who is not content to remain in the sphere in which he was born, and in which accordingly his life task is divinely set.