GREAT MEN'S BODIES
A capital body had this light-hearted Scot; reformer of classical education in Scotland; the best friend her crofters ever knew, raising a large amount of money for their relief—just the body for a scholar. And all his life a walker. It was from Oban that Blackie used to go off for a fortnight's walk on what he called "the one-shirt expedition." There was not a high mountain in Scotland that he did not get to the top of at some time or other, and The Lays of the Highlands and Islands, which he published, with some instruction on geology and other useful matters, for the benefit of tourists, were composed, he tells us, "With no conscious purpose at all; but merely to pour forth the spontaneous happy moods of my own soul, as they came upon me during many years rambling the Bens and Glens of my Scottish fatherland." It was he who had walked so much in Germany, and all over Greece and Scotland. And not only did he take these fortnightly tramps when he was in the sixties; but he continued a spry, light, staying walker far on into old age, always carrying a stick, but no man ever saw him leaning on it. A fresh-faced, healthy, fine-grained man.
Punch missed him, too, as well as all Great Britain, for on March 9, 1895, it added its tribute:
How much of light with thee's departed?
Philosopher, yet full of fun,
Great humorist, yet human-hearted;
A Caledonian, yet not dour;
A scholar, yet not dry-as-dusty;
A pietist, yet never sour!
O, stout and tender, true and trusty.
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