In the shooting season he generally spent some time at a place called Ardwhillery, in the Highlands, and there, as well as at Kinnaird, he amused himself by translating the Prophecies of Enoch from the Abyssinian. He also made a slow progress in transcribing and arranging his journals; but, happy in his own domestic circle, and conscious that he had been a faithful servant to his country, he seemed to prefer repose to the vexation of laying his travels before the public. Always fond of astronomy, from which he had derived so much practical advantage, he erected, on the top of his house at Kinnaird, a temporary observatory; and, dressed in Abyssinian costume, wearing even the turban, he occasionally enjoyed very natural and delightful reflections in gazing, from a tranquil and civilized country, upon constellations in the heavens, which he had so often watched in moments of danger and privation; but a man's notions seldom fit his neighbours; and, "Eh! the laird's gaen daft!" was the opinion which the country people of Kinnaird secretly expressed among themselves at Bruce's astronomical operations. After having enjoyed nearly twelve years of quiet domestic happiness, Bruce lost his wife. She died in 1785, leaving him two children, a son and daughter. Thus deprived of his best friend and companion, he again became restless and melancholy. "The love of solitude," he very justly says, "is the constant follower of affliction. This again naturally turns an instructed mind to study." These feelings Bruce's friends strongly encouraged, and they used every endeavour to rouse him from his melancholy, and to persuade him to occupy his mind in the arrangement and publication of his travels. "My friends unanimously assailed me," he says, "in the part most accessible when the spirits are weak, which is vanity. They represented to me how ignoble it was, after all my dangers and difficulties, to be conquered by a misfortune incident to all men, the indulgence of which was unreasonable in itself, fruitless in its consequence, and so unlike the expectation I had given my country by the firmness and intrepidity of my former character and behaviour. "Others, whom I mention only for the sake of comparison, below all notice on any other account, attempted to succeed in the same design by anonymous letters and paragraphs in the newspapers; and thereby absurdly endeavoured to oblige me to publish an account of those travels, which they affected, at the same time, to believe I had never performed." "It is universally known," states the Gentleman's Magazine for 1789, "that doubts have been entertained _whether Mr. Bruce was ever in Abyssinia_. The Baron de Tott, speaking of the sources of the Nile, says, 'A traveller named Bruce, it is said, has pretended to have discovered them. I saw at Cairo the servant who was his guide and companion during the journey, who assured me that he had _no knowledge of any such discovery_.'"