The voyage and its incidents, from the Clyde to the Mediterranean - A passing view of Gibraltar, Malta, and Alexandria-A visit to Cairo, Memphis, and the Pyramids.
of my health had made Four and twenty years' ministry in a great city
EARLY in the spring of 1857, the state it necessary that I should leave home. uninterrupted service in the Christian had begun at length to tell upon my constitution in effects which it seemed unsafe to trifle with. The medicine most needed, in the opinion of the competent authorities, was a good clerical furlough, to be spent as far away as possible from the
fumus strepitusque Romæ."
The leave was promptly and cordially granted by my ecclesiastical superiors, but the embarrassing question remained— Where was I to go? We were only as yet in the middle of February, and the weather was cold and stormy. It was not a time, as Baillie Nicol Jarvie would have said, to turn one's back on "the comforts of the Saltmarket." Bile and dyspepsia shrink with instinctive dread from the chilling winds and the damp beds which a journey at so inclement a season of the year inevitably suggests. All at once, however, and quite unexpectedly, a way of escape was opened for me out of these doubts