No minister, whose hands were full at home, ever travelled more or further, whether as tourist or apostle, than Norman Macleod. At least once a year on an average he spent time on the Continent. In the summer of 1860, with a view to preach to the Scottish artisans residing at certain places in Northern Europe, he started for St. Petersburg. Elsinore, where he landed in honour of Hamlet, he was disappointed to find no ‘wild and stormy steep,’ but a quiet little wooden town, full of fish and sailors. By almost everything in Russia he was disgusted. There for the first and last time in a foreign country, things failed to engage his interest. He visited the various churches of the capital, and notes St. Isaac’s as ‘great in granite, magnificent in malachite, and hoary in nothing but superstition.’ In the Kazan he saw many flags that had been taken in war, and never an English one in the collection! The islands of the Neva pleased him; but the best scene of all was where he could study Russia and mankind, the bazaar. Of a mammoth, the skeleton of which he saw in the museum, he remarks, ‘It died before Adam was born,’ and this in _Good Words_, where there was to be nothing to pain the weakest Christian! The hotels were ‘filthy, the police villains, the palaces shams, the natives ugly,’ which strain, quite exceptional for Macleod, was due to his hatred of the Russian system. At Moscow, however, he was fairly captivated by the Kremlin. Wherever a number of his fellow-countrymen could be got together he held services, and once a woman took his hand, saying, ‘My heart is full, I canna speak.’ His next visit abroad, two years later, was to Italy, and the change from St. Petersburg to Venice is marked in the finer tone of the record. ‘We went in our gondolas about nine at night beneath the bridge of the Rialto.... Palaces and churches were steeped in the calm brilliancy of the southern night. There was a silence such as could not reign in any other city on earth. A whisper, one’s very breathing might be heard. Every palace was visible as in daylight, and, except for the forms of dark gondolas which glided past, or a few lights that like fireflies darted amid the darkness of the mysterious water-streets which opened into the Grand Canal, the city seemed as if dead.’