"He said he had found it so dull being quite alone the preceding evening, that he determined upon going with us; 'for,' said he, 'it cannot be worse than being alone.'" He liked to treat Fanny, his "little character-monger," as a fellow-author: "A shilling was now wanted for some purpose or other, and none of them happened to have one; I begged that I might lend one. 'Ay, do' said the Doctor 'I will borrow of you; authors are like privateers, always fair game for one another.'" In his last illness Johnson received Fanny into his house as long as he could. But on 25 November 1784, though his faculties were bright, the machine that contained them was "alarmingly giving away": "I saw him growing worse, and offered to go, which, for the first time I ever remember, he did not oppose; but most kindly pressing both my hands, 'Be not' he said, in a voice of even tenderness 'be not longer in coming again for my letting you go now.' I assured him I would be the sooner, and was running off, but he called me back in a solemn voice, and in a manner the most energetic, said:--'Remember me in your prayers.'" Two days before his death, when Dr Burney saw him, his message was the same: "He was up and very composed. He took his hand very kindly, asked after all his family, and then in particular how Fanny did. 'I hope,' he said 'Fanny did not take it amiss that I did not see her. I was very bad. Tell Fanny to pray for me.'" On the 20th December, when the "ever-honoured, ever-lamented" Dr Johnson was committed to the earth, Fanny could not keep her eyes dry all day. _The Tour to the Hebrides_ "Dr Johnson" says Boswell at the beginning of his account of this famous tour "had for many years given me hopes that we should go together, and visit the Hebrides." They had first discussed the project in a coffee-house in the Strand in 1763, Johnson being especially eager to see the patriarchal life of the Highlands--the clansmen living and working and fighting and dying under the fatherly rule of their chieftain. Boswell, knowing something of his friend's love of Fleet Street and of his prejudice against Scotland, "doubted that it would not be possible to prevail on Dr Johnson to relinquish the felicity of a London life." "To Scotland, however, he ventured," and the faithful Boswell has left us a careful record of his adventures and his talk on each of the 100 days he spent there. This _Journal_ was warmly praised by Johnson, who read the manuscript, and was published in the year after his death. Here we must be content with extracts, first following the travellers along the east coast of Scotland, where Johnson found the trees very few: