‘On Saturday the fourteenth of August, 1773, late in the evening, I received a note from him, that he was arrived at Boyd's inn, at the head of the Canongate. I went to him directly. He embraced me cordially …’ (Tour, 21). Neither Johnson nor Boswell opens his recollection of the Hebridean ramble with this scene, and yet the jaunt begins here, with Boswell collecting his friend at the local coach stop. Or does it? If we are looking for the jaunt's true starting point, perhaps we should go back several months and focus on Boswell soliciting help in getting Johnson to stir from London. Invitations were sought from the Scottish chiefs Macdonald and MacLeod, and letters were written to James Beattie, Lord Elibank, William Robertson and Hester Thrale. Or perhaps we should go back decades earlier, before Boswell was born, and view the young Johnson in his father's bookshop engrossed in reading Martin Martin's A Description of the Western Islands of Scotland (1703). For Boswell, as he approaches Boyd's inn, it hardly matters who or what has helped to bring his friend up north. Seeing Johnson in Scotland is for him a tonic satisfaction. A line from his journal says it all: ‘I exulted in the thought, that I now had him actually in Caledonia’ (Tour, 21).

Something in that last phrase recalls another scene at another inn, Hayward's in London.