The Highland tours added so effectively to his stock that in 1793 he was able to say that he had made pilgrimages to every spot commemorated in Scottish song except Lochaber and the Braes of Ballenden. Presumably on his passages through Edinburgh in August and September he talked with Johnson, but not until late October, after his return from Ochtertyre, did he really begin to put his energies into the work. Johnson obviously had solicited his help, and the poet’s first move was to write to all his friends who possessed words or music which might be usable. Nor did he confine himself to his own circle of acquaintance. Learning to his chagrin that he had unwittingly passed near the home of the Rev. John Skinner without calling to pay his respects to the author of ‘Tullochgorum’ and ‘John o’ Badenyon’, he seized the opportunity given by receipt of a poetic epistle from Skinner to beg the venerable clergyman’s support for Johnson’s enterprise. He soon started also to fit words of his own to fine melodies which either lacked them or had unsuitable ones--at first with a personal motive, in order to publish the complimentary verses he had written to Margaret Chalmers and Charlotte Hamilton, but soon with no purpose except that of supplying his favourite music with words which could be sung. Moreover, he commenced to gather all available publications of Scottish songs and song music. How thoroughly he went into this search is revealed by his quiet remark to George Thomson five years later: ‘Let me have a list of your airs, with the first line of the verses you intend for them.... I say, the first line of the verses, because if they are verses that have appeared in any of our Collections of songs, I know them & can have recourse to them.’ He had in fact ranged so widely in the old song books that even yet his editors have been unable to identify the originals of some of the songs he altered and adapted for the _Museum_, and later on for Thomson’s _Select Collection_. But though in 1787 he realized better than Johnson did the magnitude of the task and the opportunity before them, he was still unaware of its true scope. He conjectured that there would be three volumes of a hundred songs each. The completed work filled six.