In England, unless it were in London, Johnstone seldom felt at home; in Scotland, still less. He liked to wander from one easy variegated foreign city to another, where good music and good plays are quickly accessible, and British convention is a mere figure in the comic papers. He valued his friends in Edinburgh, but the place displeased him. He would sit on Arthur's seat and hate the modern Athens steaming there below him. Its curious old mossy layers of culture, professional and academic, could hardly satisfy him, and he quickly got through the moss to the stone. The ferment of the young "Celtic" writers and painters seemed to come to little. He did not inure himself to the occasionally inconsiderate manners of the Lowland Scotch, nor could he bring himself to repay them steadily in kind. Some of the officials with whom he dealt appeared to have been born, where they would die, in Gath. He would hardly agree with, but he could understand the unqualified remark of his old French associate, "Il n'y a pas d'amour dans ce pays." Probably he was unjust to Edinburgh; but though his forbears were partly Scotch, he was not, like Stevenson, born Scotch, and he never really saw the native character from within. Teaching may not have been the best introduction to it. He taught well, having the right sort of delivery and insistent method. But it is disgusting to an artist to teach anything for bread, except, perhaps, his own craft. The hard work, the pull on the nerves and patience, can scarcely have strengthened Johnstone's health.