Page:Footsteps of Dr. Johnson.djvu/245

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SIR WALTER SCOTT AT DUNVEGAN.
193

at supper. The laird, surrounded by so many of his clan, was to me a pleasing sight. They listened with wonder and pleasure while Dr. Johnson harangued." It was very likely in this same room that Sir Walter Scott breakfasted that August morning forty-one years later, "when he woke under the castle of Dunvegan. I had," he writes, "sent a card to the laird of Macleod, who came off before we were dressed, and carried us to his castle to breakfast."[1]

Dining Room, Dunvegan Castle.
Dining Room, Dunvegan Castle.

Dining Room, Dunvegan Castle.

The noble drawing-room, with the deep recesses for the windows in walls nine feet thick, is not the one described by Boswell. The drawing-room which he saw "had formerly been," he says, "the bed-chamber of Sir Roderick Macleod, and he chose it because behind it there was a cascade, the sound of which disposed him to sleep." At the time of Sir Walter Scott's visit it had again become a bed-room, for here he slept on a stormy night. He had accepted, he says, "the courteous offer of the haunted apartment," and this

  1. Lockhart's Scott, iv. 302.

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