II. SCOTLAND AND ENGLAND.

A BURNS PILGRIMAGE.

A shining-beached crescent of country facing to the sunset, and rising higher and higher to the east till it becomes mountain, is the county of Ayrshire, fair and famous among the southern Scotch highlands. To a sixty-mile measure by air, between its north and south promontories, it stretches a curving coast of ninety; and when Robert Burns strolled over its breezy uplands, he saw always beautiful and mysterious silver lines of land thrusting themselves out into the mists of the sea, pointing to far-off island peaks, seeming sometimes to bridge and sometimes to wall vistas ending only in sky. These lines are as beautiful, elusive, and luring now as then, and in the inalienable loyalty of nature bear testimony to-day to their lover.

This is the greatest crown of the hero and the poet. Other great men hold fame by failing records which moth and fire destroy. The places that knew them know them no more when they are dead. Marble and canvas and parchment league in vain to keep green the memory of him who did not love and consecrate by his life-blood, in fight or in song, the soil where he trod. But for him who has done this,—who fought well, sang well,—the morning cloud, and the wild rose, and broken blades of grass under men's feet, become immortal witnesses; so imperishable, after all, are what we are in the habit of calling the "perishable things of this earth."

More than two hundred years ago, when the followers and holders of the different baronies of Ayrshire compared respective dignities and values, they made a proverb which ran:—

Before the nineteenth century set in, the proverb should have been changed; for Kyle is the land through which "Bonnie Doon" and Irvine Water run, and there has been never a man in all Carrick of whom Carrick can be proud as is Kyle of Robert Burns. It has been said that a copy of his poems lies on every Scotch cottager's shelf, by the side of the Bible. This is probably not very far from the truth. Certain it is, that in the villages where he dwelt there seems to be no man, no child, who does not apparently know every detail of the life he lived there, nearly a hundred years ago.

"Will ye be drivin' over to Tarbolton in the morning?" said the pretty young vice-landlady of the King's Arms at Ayr, when I wrote my name in her visitors' book late one Saturday night.

"What made you think of that?" I asked, amused.

"And did ye not come on account o' Burns?" she replied. "There's been a many from your country here by reason of him this summer. I think you love him in America a'most as well as we do oursel's. It's vary seldom the English come to see anythin' aboot him. They've so many poets o' their own, I suppose, is the reason o' their not thinkin' more o' Burns."

All that there was unflattering in this speech I forgave by reason of the girl's sweet low voice, pretty gray eyes, and gentle, refined hospitality. She might have been the daughter of some country gentleman, welcoming a guest to the house; and she took as much interest in making all the arrangements for my drive to Tarbolton the next morning as if it had been a pleasure excursion for herself. It is but a dull life she leads, helping her widowed mother keep the King's Arms,—dull, and unprofitable too, I fear; for it takes four men-servants and seven women to keep up the house, and I saw no symptom of any coming or going of customers in it. A stillness as of a church on weekdays reigned throughout the establishment. "At the races and when the yeomanry come," she said, there was something to do; but "in the winter nothing, except at the times of the county balls. You know, ma'am, we've many county families here," she remarked with gentle pride, "and they all stop with us."

There is a compensation to the lower orders of a society where rank and castes are fixed, which does not readily occur at first sight to the democratic mind naturally rebelling against such defined distinctions. It is very much to be questioned whether, in a republic, the people who find themselves temporarily lower down in the social scale than they like to be or expect to stay, feel, in their consciousness of the possibility of rising, half so much pride or satisfying pleasure as do the lower classes in England, for instance, in their relations with those whom they serve, whose dignity they seem to share by ministering to it.

The way from Ayr to Tarbolton must be greatly changed since the day when the sorrowful Burns family trod it, going from the Mount Oliphant farm to that of Lochlea. Now it is for miles a smooth road, on which horses' hoofs ring merrily, and neat little stone houses, with pretty yards, line it on both sides for some distance. The ground rises almost immediately, so that the dwellers in these little suburban houses get fine off-looks seaward and a wholesome breeze in at their windows. The houses are built joined by twos, with a yard in common. They have three rooms besides the kitchen, and they rent for twenty-five pounds a year; so no industrious man of Ayr need be badly lodged. Where the houses leave off, hedges begin,—thorn and beech, untrimmed and luxuriant, with great outbursts of white honeysuckle and sweet-brier at intervals. As far as the eye could see were waving fields of wheat, oats, and "rye-grass," which last being just ripe was of a glorious red color. The wheat-fields were rich and full, sixty bushels to the acre. Oats, which do not take so kindly to the soil and air, produce sometimes only forty-eight.

Burns was but sixteen when his father moved from Mount Oliphant to the Lochlea farm, in the parish of Tarbolton. It was in Tarbolton that he first went to dancing-school, joined the Freemasons, and organized the club which, no doubt, cost him dear, "The Bachelors of Tarbolton." In the beginning this club consisted of only five members besides Burns and his brother; afterward it was enlarged to sixteen. Burns drew up the rules; and the last one—the tenth—is worth remembering, as an unconscious defining on his part of his ideal of human life:—

"Every man proper for a member of this society must have a friendly, honest, open heart, above everything dirty or mean, and must be a professed lover of one or more of the sex. The proper person for this society is a cheerful, honest-hearted lad, who, if he has a friend that is true, and a mistress that is kind, and as much wealth as genteelly to make both ends meet, is just as happy as this world can make him."

Walking to-day through the narrow streets of Tarbolton, it is wellnigh impossible to conceive of such rollicking good cheer having made abiding-place there. It is a close, packed town, the houses of stone or white plaster,—many of them low, squalid, with thatched roofs and walls awry; those that are not squalid are grim. The streets are winding and tangled; the people look poor and dull. As I drove up to the "Crown Inn," the place where the Tarbolton Freemasons meet now, and where some of the relics of Burns's Freemason days are kept, the "first bells" were ringing in the belfry of the old church opposite, and the landlord of the inn replied with a look of great embarrassment to my request to see the Burns relics,—

"It's the Sabbath, mem."

Then he stood still, scratching his head for a few moments, and then set off, at full run, down the street without another word.

"He's gone to the head Mason," explained the landlady. "It takes three to open the chest. I think ye'll na see it the day." And she turned on her heel with a frown and left me.

"They make much account o' the Sabbath in this country," said my driver. "Another day ye'd do better."

Thinking of Burns's lines to the "Unco Guid," I strolled over into the churchyard opposite, to await the landlord's return. The bell-ringer had come down, and followed me curiously about among the graves. One very old stone had carved upon it two high-top boots; under these, two low shoes; below these, two kneeling figures, a man and a woman, cut in high relief; no inscription of any sort.

"What can it mean?" I asked.

The bell-ringer could not tell; it was so old nobody knew anything about it. His mother, now ninety years of age, remembered seeing it when she was a child, and it looked just as old then as now.

"There's a many strange things in this graveyard," said he; and then he led me to a corner where, enclosed by swinging chains and stone posts, was a carefully kept square of green turf, on which lay a granite slab. "Every year comes the money to pay for keeping that grass green," he said, "and no name to it. It's been going on that way for fifty years."

The stone-wall around the graveyard was dilapidated, and in parts was falling down.

"I suppose this old wall was here in Burns's time," I said.

"Ay, yes," said the bell-ringer; and pointing to a low, thatched cottage just outside it, "and yon shop—many's the time he's been in it playin' his tricks."

The landlord of the inn now came running up, with profuse apologies for the ill success of his mission. He had been to the head Mason, hoping he would come over and assist in the opening of the chest, in which were kept a Mason's apron worn by Burns, some jewels of his, and a book of minutes kept by him. But "bein' 's it's the Sabbath," and "he's sick in bed," and it was "against the rules to open the regalia chest unless three Masons were present," the kindly landlord, piling up reason after reason, irrespective of their consistency with each other, went on to explain that it would be impossible; but I might see the chair in which Burns always sat. This was a huge oaken chair, black with age, and furrowed with names cut deep in the wood. It was shaped and proportioned like a child's high-chair, and had precisely such a rest for the feet as is put on children's high-chairs. To this day the Grand Mason sits in it at their meetings, and will so long as the St. James Lodge exists.

"They've been offered hundreds of pounds for that chair, mem, plain as it is. You'd not think it; but there's no money'd buy it from the lodge," said the landlord.

The old club-house where the jolly "Bachelors of Tarbolton" met in Burns's day is a low, two-roomed, thatched cottage, half in ruins. The room where the bachelors smoked, drank, and sang is now little more than a cellar filled with rubbish and filth,—nothing left but the old fireplace to show that it was ever inhabited. In the other half of the cottage lives a laborer's family,—father, mother, and a young child: their one room, with its bed built into the wall, and their few delf dishes on the dresser, is probably much like the room in which Burns first opened his wondrous eyes. The man was lying on the floor playing with his baby. At the name of Burns, he sprang up with a hearty "Ay, weel," and ran out in his blue-stocking feet to show me the cellar, of which, it was plainly to be seen, he was far prouder than of his more comfortable side of the house. The name by which the inn was called in Burns's day he did not know. But "He's a Mason over there; he'll know," he cried; and before I could prevent him, he had darted, still shoeless, across the road, and asked the question of a yet poorer laborer, who was taking his Sunday on his door-sill with two bairns between his knees. He had heard, but had "forgotten." "Feyther'll know," said the wife, coming forward with the third bairn, a baby, in her arms. "I'll rin an' ask feyther." The old man tottered out, and gazed with a vacant, feeble look at me, while he replied impatiently to his daughter: "Manson's Inn, 't was called; ye've heard it times eneuch."

"I dare say you always drink Burns's health at the lodge when you meet," I said to the laborer.

"Ay, ay, his health's ay dronkit," he said, with a coarse laugh, "weel dronkit."

A few rods to the east, and down the very road Burns was wont to come and go between Lochlea and Tarbolton, still stands "Willie's mill,"—cottage and mill and shed and barn, all in one low, long, oddly joined (or jointed) building of irregular heights, like a telescope pulled out to its full length; a little brook and a bit of gay garden in front. In the winter the mill goes by water from a lake near by; in the summer by steam,—a great change since the night when Burns went

and though he thought he

could not for the life of him make out to count the moon's horns.

To go by road from Tarbolton to Lochlea farm is to go around three sides of a square, east, north, and then west again. Certain it is that Burns never took so many superfluous steps to do it; and as I drove along I found absorbing interest in looking at the little cluster of farm buildings beyond the fields, and wondering where the light-footed boy used to "cut across" for his nightly frolics. There is nothing left at Lochlea now of him or his; nothing save a worn lintel of the old barn. The buildings are all new; and there is a look of thrift and comfort about the place, quite unlike the face it must have worn in 1784. The house stands on a rising knoll, and from the windows looking westward and seaward there must be a fine horizon and headlands to be seen at sunset. Nobody was at home on this day except a barefooted servant-girl, who was keeping the house while the family were at church. She came to the door with an expression of almost alarm, at the unwonted apparition of a carriage driving down the lane on Sunday, and a stranger coming in the name of a man dead so long ago. She evidently knew nothing of Burns except that, for some reason connected with him, the old lintel was kept and shown. She was impatient of the interruption of her Sabbath, and all the while she was speaking kept her finger in her book—"Footprints of Jesus"—at the place where she had been reading, and glanced at it continually, as if it were an amulet which could keep her from harm through the worldly interlude into which she had been forced.

"It's a pity ye came on the Sabba-day," remarked the driver again, as we drove away from Lochlea. "The country people 'ull not speak on the Sabbath." It would have been useless to try to explain to him that the spectacle of this Scottish "Sabba-day" was of itself of almost as much interest as the sight of the fields in which Robert Burns had walked and worked.

The farm of Mossgiel, which was Burns's next home after Lochlea, is about three miles from Tarbolton, and only one from Mauchline. Burns and his brother Gilbert had become tenants of it a few months before their father's death in 1784. It was stocked by the joint savings of the whole family; and each member of the family was allowed fair rates of wages for all labor performed on it. The allowance to Gilbert and to Robert was seven pounds a year each, and it is said that during the four years that Robert lived there, his expenses never exceeded this pittance.

To Mossgiel he came with new resolutions. He had already reaped some bitter harvests from the wild oats sown during the seven years at Lochlea. He was no longer a boy. He says of himself at this time,—

"I entered on Mossgiel with a full resolution, 'Come, go; I will be wise.'"

Driving up the long, straight road which leads from the highway to the hawthorn fortress in which the Mossgiel farm buildings stand, one recalls these words, and fancies the brave young fellow striding up the field, full of new hope and determination. The hawthorn hedge to-day is much higher than a man's head, and completely screens from the road the farm-house and the outbuildings behind it. The present tenants have lived on the farm forty years, the first twenty in the same house which stood there when Robert and Gilbert Burns pledged themselves to pay one hundred and twenty pounds a year for the farm. When the house was rebuilt, twenty years ago, the old walls were used in part, and the windows were left in the same places; but, instead of the low, sloping-roofed, garret-like rooms upstairs, where Burns used to sleep and write, are now comfortable chambers of modern fashion.

"Were you not sorry to have the old house pulled down?" I said to the comely, aged farm-wife.

"'Deed, then, I was very prood," she replied; "it had na 'coomodation, and the thatch took in the rain an' all that was vile."

In the best room of the house hung two autograph letters of Burns's plainly framed: one, his letter to the lass of ——, asking her permission to print the poem he had addressed to her; the other, the original copy of the poem. These were "presented to the house by the brother of the lady," the woman said, and they had "a great value now." But when she first came to this part of the country she was "vary soorpreezed" to find the great esteem in which Burns's poetry was held. In the North, where she had lived, he was "na thocht weel of." Her father had never permitted a copy of his poems to be brought inside his doors, and had forbidden his children to read a word of them. "He thocht them too rough for us to read." It was not until she was a woman grown, and living in her husband's house, that she had ever ventured to disobey this parental command, and she did not now herself think they were "fitted for the reading of young pairsons." "There was much more discreet writin's," she said severely; an opinion which there was no gainsaying.

There is a broader horizon to be seen, looking westward from the fields of Mossgiel, than from those of Lochlea; the lands are higher and nobler of contour. Superb trees, which must have been superb a century ago, stand to right and left of the house,—beeches, ashes, oaks, and planes. The fields which are in sight from the house are now all grass-grown. I have heard that twenty years ago, it was confidently told in which field Burns, ploughing late in the autumn, broke into the little nest of the

whom every song-lover has known and pitied from that day to this, and whose misfortunes have answered ever since for a mint of reassuring comparison to all of us, remembering that "the best-laid schemes o' mice an' men" must "gang aft aglee;" and the other field, also near by, where grew that mountain daisy,

whose name is immortal in our hearts as that of Burns. This farm-wife, however, knew nothing about them. The stern air of the north country in which she had been reared still chilled somewhat her thoughts of Burns and her interest in his inalienable bond on the fields of her farm.

It is but a mile from Mossgiel's gate to Mauchline, the town of "bonnie Jean" and Nansie Tinnoch and Gavin Hamilton. Surely a strange-assorted trio to be comrades of one man. Their houses are still standing: Jean's a tumble-down thatched cottage, looking out of place enough between the smart, new houses built on either side of it; Gavin Hamilton's, a dark, picturesque stone house, joined to the ruins of Mauchline Castle; and Nansie Tinnoch's, a black and dilapidated hovel, into which it takes courage to go. It stands snugged up against the wall of the old graveyard, part below it and part above it,—a situation as unwholesome as horrible; a door at the head of the narrow stairway opening out into the graveyard itself, and the slanting old stones leering in at the smoky windows by crowds. In the days when all the "country side" met at the open-air services in this churchyard,

no doubt Nancy Tinnoch's was a lighter, whiter, cheerier place than now; else the "Jolly Beggars" would never have gone there to tipple.

It was the nooning between services when I reached Mauchline, and church-goers from a distance were taking their beer and crackers decorously in the parlor of the inn. As the intermission was only three quarters of an hour long, this much of involuntary dissipation was plainly forced on them; but they did not abuse it, I can testify. They partook of it as of a passover: young men and maidens as sober and silent as if they had been doing solemn penance for sins, as indeed, from one point of view, it might perhaps be truly said that they were.

By dint of some difficult advances I drew one or two of them into conversation about the Mossgiel farm and the disappearance of the old relics of Burns's life in that region. It was a great pity, I said, that the Mossgiel house had to be taken down.

"'Deed, then, it was na such thing," spoke up an elderly man. "It was na moor than a wreck, an' I'm the mon who did it."

He was the landlord of the farm, it appeared. He seemed much amused at hearing of the farm-wife's disapproval of Burns's verses, and of her father's prohibition of them.

"He was a heepocritical auld Radical, if ye knows him," he said angrily. "I hope we'll never have ony worse readin' in our country than Robert Bur-r-r-ns." The prolongation of the "r" in the Scotch way of saying "Burns" is something that cannot be typographically represented. It is hardly a rolling of the "r," nor a multiplication of it; but it takes up a great deal more time and room than any one "r" ought to.

After the landlady had shown to me the big hall where the Freemasons meet, "the Burns' Mother Lodge," and the chest which used to hold the regalia at Tarbolton in Burns's day, and the little bedroom in which Stedman and Hawthorne had slept,—coming also to look at Burns's fields,—she told me in a mysterious whisper that there was a nephew of Burns's in the kitchen, who would like to see me, if I would like to see him. "A nephew of Burns's!" I exclaimed. "Weel, not exactly," she explained, "but he's a grand-nephew of Burns's wife; she thet was Jean, ye know," with a deprecating nod and lowering of the eyelid. So fast is the clutch of a Scotch neighborhood on its traditions of offended virtue, even to-day poor Jean cannot be mentioned by a landlady in her native town without a small stone cast backward at her.

Jean's grand-nephew proved to be a middle-aged man; not "ower weel-to-do," the landlady said. He had tried his hand at doctoring both in Scotland and America,—a rolling stone evidently, with too much of the old fiery blood of his race in his veins for quiet and decorous prosperity. He, too, seemed only half willing to speak of poor "Jean,"—his kinswoman; but he led me to the cottage where she had lived, and pointed out the window from which she was said to have leaned out many a night listening to the songs of her lover when he sauntered across from the Whiteford Arms, Johnny Pigeon's house, just opposite, "not fou, but having had plenty" to make him merry and affectionate. Johnny Pigeon's is a "co-operative store" now; and new buildings have altered the line of the street so that "Rob Mossgiel" would lose his way there to-day.

The room in which Burns and his "bonnie Jean" were at last married in Gavin Hamilton's house, by Hamilton himself, is still shown to visitors. This room I had a greater desire to see than any other spot in Mauchline. "We can but try," said the grand-nephew; "but it's a small chance of seeing it the Sabba."

The sole tenant of this house now is the widow of a son of Gavin Hamilton's. Old, blind, and nearly helpless, she lives there alone with one family servant, nearly as old as herself, but hale, hearty, and rosy as only an old Scotchwoman can be. This servant opened the door for us, her cap, calico gown, and white apron all alike bristling with starch, religion, and pride of family. Her mistress would not allow the room to be shown on the Sabbath, she said. Imploringly it was explained to her that no other day had been possible, and that I had come "all the way from America."

"Ye did na do weel to tak the Sabbath," was her only reply, as she turned on her heel to go with the fruitless appeal to her mistress. Returning, she said curtly,—

"She winna shew it on the Sabbath."

At this crisis my companion, who had kept in the background, stepped forward with,—

"You don't know me, Elspie, do ye?"

"No, sir," she said stiffly, bracing herself up mentally against any further heathenish entreaties.

"What, not know ——?" repeating his name in full.

Presto! as if changed by a magician's trick, the stiff, starched, religious, haughty family retainer disappeared, and there stood, in the same cap, gown, and apron, a limber, rollicking, wellnigh improper old woman, who poked the grand-nephew in the ribs, clapped him on the shoulder, chuckling, ejaculating, questioning, wondering, laughing, all in a breath. Reminiscence on reminiscence followed between them.

"An' do ye mind Barry, too?" she asked. (This was an old man-servant of the house.) "An' many's the quirrel, an' many's the gree we had."

Barry was dead. Dead also was the beautiful girl whom my companion remembered well,—dead of a broken heart before she was eighteen years of age. Forbidden to marry her lover, she had drooped and pined. He went to India and died. It was in a December the news of his death came, just at Christmas time, and in the next September she followed him.

"Ay, but she was a bonnie lass," said Elspie, the tears rolling down her face.

"I dare say she [nodding his head toward the house]—I dare say she's shed many a salt tear over it; but naebody 'ill ever know she repentit," quoth the grand-nephew.

"Ay, ay," said Elspie. "There's a wee bit closet in every hoos."

"'Twas in that room she died," pointing up to a small ivy-shaded window. "I closed her eyes wi' my hands. She's never spoken of. She was a bonnie lass."

The picture of this desolate old woman, sitting there alone in her house, helpless, blind, waiting for death to come and take her to meet that daughter whose young heart was broken by her cruel will, seemed to shadow the very sunshine on the greensward in the court. The broken arches and crumbling walls of the old stone abbey ruins seemed, in their ivy mantles, warmly, joyously venerable by contrast with the silent, ruined, stony old human heart still beating in the house they joined.

In spite of my protestations, the grand-nephew urged Elspie to show us the room. She evidently now longed to do it; but, casting a fearful glance over her shoulder, said: "I daur na! I daur na! I could na open the door that she'd na hear 't." And she seemed much relieved when I made haste to assure her that on no account would I go into the room without her mistress's permission. So we came away, leaving her gazing regretfully after us, with her hand shading her eyes from the sun.

Going back from Mauchline to Ayr, I took another road, farther to the south than the one leading through Tarbolton, and much more beautiful, with superb beech-trees meeting overhead, and gentlemen's country-seats, with great parks, on either hand.

On this road is Montgomerie Castle, walled in by grand woods, which Burns knew so well.

Sitting in the sun, on a bench outside the gate-house, with his little granddaughter on his lap, was the white-haired gate-keeper. As the horses' heads turned toward the gate, he arose slowly, without a change of muscle, and set down the child, who accepted her altered situation also without a change of muscle in her sober little face.

"Is it allowed to go in?" asked the driver.

"Eh—ye'll not be calling at the hoos?" asked the old man, surprised.

"No, I'm a stranger; but I like to see all the fine places in your country," I replied.

"I've no orders," looking at the driver reflectively; "I've no orders—but—a decent pairson"—looking again scrutinizingly at me,—"I think there can be no hairm." And he opened the gate.

Grand trees, rolling tracts of velvety turf, an ugly huge house of weather-beaten stone, with white pillars in front; conservatories joining the wings to the centre; no attempt at decorative landscape art; grass, trees, distances,—these were all; but there were miles of these. It was at least a mile's drive to the other entrance to the estate, where the old stone gateway house was in ruin. I fancy that it was better kept up in the days before an Earl of Eglinstoune sold it to a plain Mr. Patterson.

At another fine estate nearer Ayr, where an old woman was gate-keeper, and also had "no orders" about admitting strangers, the magic word "America" threw open the gates with a sweep, and bent the old dame's knees in a courtesy which made her look three times as broad as she was long. This estate had been "always in the Oswald family, an' is likely always to be, please God," said the loyal creature, with another courtesy at the mention, unconsciously devout as that of the Catholic when he crosses himself. "An' it's a fine country ye've yersel' in America," she added politely. The Oswald estate has acres of beautiful curving uplands, all green and smooth and open; a lack of woods near the house, but great banks of sunshine instead, make a beauty all their own; and the Ayr Water, running through the grounds, and bridged gracefully here and there, is a possession to be coveted. From all points is a clear sight of sea, and headlands north and south,—Ayr harbor lying like a crescent, now silver, now gold, afloat between blue sky and green shore, and dusky gray roof-lines of the town.

The most precious thing in all the parish of Ayr is the cottage in which Burns was born. It is about two miles south from the centre of the town, on the shore of "Bonnie Doon," and near Alloway Kirk. You cannot go thither from Ayr over any road except the one Tam o' Shanter took: it has been straightened a little since his day, but many a rod of it is the same that Maggie trod; and Alloway Kirk is as ghostly a place now, even at high noon, as can be found "frae Maidenkirk to Johnny Groat's." There is nothing left of it but the walls and the gable, in which the ancient bell still hangs, intensifying the silence by its suggestion of echoes long dead.

The Burns cottage is now a sort of inn, kept by an Englishman whose fortunes would make a tale by themselves. He fought at Balaklava and in our civil war; and side by side on the walls of his dining-room hang, framed, his two commissions in the Pennsylvania Volunteers and the menu of the Balaklava Banquet, given in London to the brave fellows that came home alive after that fight. He does not love the Scotch people.

"I would not give the Americans for all the Scotch ever born," he says, and is disposed to speak with unjust satire of their apparent love of Burns, which he ascribes to a perception of his recognition by the rest of the world and a shamefaced desire not to seem to be behindhand in paying tribute to him.

"Oh, they let on to think much of him," he said. "It's money in their pockets."

The room in which Burns was born is still unaltered, except in having one more window let in. Originally, it had but one small square window of four panes. The bed is like the beds in all the old Scotch cottages, built into the wall, similar to those still seen in Norway. Stifling enough the air surely must have been in the cupboard bed in which the "waly boy" was born.

Before he was many days old, or, as some traditions have it, on the very night he was born, a violent storm "tirled" away part of the roof of the poor little "clay biggin," and mother and babe were forced to seek shelter in a neighbor's cottage. Misfortune and Robin early joined company, and never parted. The little bedroom is now the show-room of the inn, and is filled with tables piled with the well-known boxes, pincushions, baskets, paper-cutters, etc., made from sycamore wood grown on the banks of Doon and Ayr. These articles are all stamped with some pictures of scenery associated with Burns or with quotations from his verses. It is impossible to see all this money-making without thinking what a delicious, rollicking bit of verse Burns would write about it himself if he came back to-day. There are those who offer for sale articles said to be made out of the old timbers of the Mossgiel house; but the Balaklava Englishman scouts all that as the most barefaced imposture. "There wasn't an inch of that timber," he says,—and he was there when the house was taken down—"which wasn't worm-eaten and rotten; not enough to make a knife-handle of!"

One feels disposed to pass over in silence the "Burns Monument," which was built in 1820, at a cost of over three thousand pounds; "a circular temple supported by nine fluted Corinthian columns, emblematic of the nine muses," say the guide-books. It stands in a garden overlooking the Doon, and is a painful sight. But in a room in the base of it are to be seen some relics at which no Burns lover can look unmoved,—the Bibles he gave to Highland Mary, the ring with which he wedded Jean (taken off after her death), and two rings containing some of his hair.

It is but a few steps from this monument down to a spot on the "banks o' bonnie Doon," from which is a fine view of the "auld brig." This shining, silent water, and the overhanging, silent trees, and the silent bell in the gable of Alloway Kirk, speak more eloquently of Burns than do all nine of the Corinthian muse-dedicated pillars in his monument.

So do the twa brigs of Ayr, which still stand at the foot of High Street, silently recriminating each other as of old.

sneers the Auld; and

retorts the New; and "the sprites that owre the brigs of Ayr preside" never interrupt the quarrel. Spite of all its boasting, however, the new bridge cracked badly two years ago, and had to be taken down and entirely rebuilt.

The dingy little inn where

is still called by his name, and still preserves, as its chief claims to distinction, the big wooden mug out of which Tam drank, and the chair in which he so many market-nights

The chair is of oak, wellnigh black as ebony, and furrowed thick with names cut upon it. The smart young landlady who now keeps the house commented severely on this desecration of it, and said that for some years the house had been "keepit" by a widow, who was "in no sense up to the beesiness," and "a' people did as they pleased in the hoos in her day." The mug has a metal rim and base; but spite of these it has needed to be clasped together again by three ribs of cane, riveted on. "Money couldn't buy it," the landlady said. It belongs to the house, is mentioned always in the terms of lease, and the house has changed hands but four times since Tam's day.

In a tiny stone cottage in the southern suburbs of Ayr, live two nieces of Burns, daughters of his youngest sister, Isabella. They are vivacious still, and eagerly alive to all that goes on in the world, though they must be well on in the seventies. The day I called they had "just received a newspaper from America," they said. "Perhaps I knew it. It was called 'The Democrat.'" As I was not able to identify it by that description, the younger sister made haste to fetch it. It proved to be a paper printed in Madison, Iowa. The old ladies were much interested in the approaching American election, had read all they could find about General Garfield, and were much impressed by the wise reticence of General Grant. "He must be a vary cautious man; disna say enough to please people," they said, with sagacious nods of approbation. They remembered Burns's wife very well, had visited her when she was living, a widow, at Dumfries, and told with glee a story which they said she herself used to narrate, with great relish, of a pedler lad who, often coming to the house with wares to sell in the kitchen, finally expressed to the servant his deep desire to see Mrs. Burns. She accordingly told him to wait, and her mistress would, no doubt, before long come into the room. Mrs. Burns came in, stood for some moments talking with the lad, bought some trifle of him, and went away. Still he sat waiting. At last the servant asked why he did not go. He replied that she had promised he should see Mrs. Burns.

"But ye have seen her; that was she," said the servant.

"Eh, eh?" said the lad. "Na! never tell me now that was 'bonnie Jean'!"

Burns's mother, too (their grandmother), they recollected well, and had often heard her tell of the time when the family lived at Lochlea, and Robert, spending his evenings at the Tarbolton merry-makings with the Bachelors' Club or the Masons, used to come home late in the night, and she used to sit up to let him in. These doings sorely displeased the father; and at last he said grimly, one night, that he would sit up to open the door for Robert. Trembling with fear, the mother went to bed, and did not close her eyes, listening apprehensively for the angry meeting between father and son. She heard the door open, the old man's stern tone, Robert's gay reply; and in a twinkling more the two were sitting together over the fire, the father splitting his sides with half-unwilling laughter at the boy's inimitable descriptions and mimicry of the scenes he had left. Nearly two hours they sat there in this way, the mother all the while cramming the bed-clothes into her mouth, lest her own laughter should remind her husband how poorly he was carrying out his threats. After that night "Rob" came home at what hour he pleased, and there was nothing more heard of his father's sitting up to reprove him.

They believed that Burns's intemperate habits had been greatly exaggerated. Their mother was a woman twenty-five years old, and the mother of three children when he died, and she had never once seen him the "waur for liquor." "There were vary mony idle people i' the warld, an' a great deal o' talk," they said. After his father's death he assumed the position of the head of the house, and led in family prayers each morning; and everybody said, even the servants, that there were never such beautiful prayers heard. He was a generous soul. After he left home he never came back for a visit, however poor he might be, without bringing a present for every member of the family; always a pound of tea for his mother, "and tea was tea then," the old ladies added. To their mother he gave a copy of Thomson's "Seasons," which they still have. They have also some letters of his, two of which I read with great interest. They were to his brother, and were full of good advice. In one he says:—

"I intended to have given you a sheetful of counsels, but some business has prevented me. In a word, learn taciturnity. Let that be your motto. Though you had the wisdom of Newton or the wit of Swift, garrulousness would lower you in the eyes of your fellow-creatures."

In the other, after alluding to some village tragedy, in which great suffering had fallen on a woman, he says,—

"Women have a kind of steady sufferance which qualifies them to endure much beyond the common run of men; but perhaps part of that fortitude is owing to their short-sightedness, as they are by no means famous for seeing remote consequences in their real importance."

The old ladies said that their mother had liked "Jean" on the whole, though "at first not so weel, on account of the connection being what it was." She was kindly, cheery, "never bonny;" but had a good figure, danced well and sang well, and worshipped her husband. She was "not intellectual;" "but there's some say a poet shouldn't have an intellectual wife," one of the ingenuous old spinsters remarked interrogatively. "At any rate, she suited him; an' it was ill speering at her after all that was said and done," the younger niece added, with real feeling in her tone. Well might she say so. If there be a touching picture in all the long list of faithful and ill-used women, it is that of "bonnie Jean,"—the unwedded mother of children, the forgiving wife of a husband who betrayed others as he had betrayed her,—when she took into her arms and nursed and cared for her husband's child, born of an outcast woman, and bravely answered all curious questioners with, "It's a neebor's bairn I'm bringin' up." She wrought for herself a place and an esteem of which her honest and loving humility little dreamed.

There is always something sad in seeking out the spot where a great man has died. It is like living over the days of his death and burial. The more sympathetically we have felt the spell of the scenes in which he lived his life, the more vitalized and vitalizing that life was, the more are we chilled and depressed in the presence of places on which his wearied and suffering gaze rested last. As I drove through the dingy, confused, and ugly streets of Dumfries, my chief thought was, "How Burns must have hated this place!" Looking back on it now, I have a half-regret that I ever saw it, that I can recall vividly the ghastly graveyard of Saint Michael's, with its twenty-six thousand gravestones and monuments, crowded closer than they would be in a marble-yard, ranged in rows against the walls without any pretence of association with the dust they affect to commemorate. What a ballad Burns might have written about such a show! And what would it not have been given to him to say of the "Genius of Coila, finding her favorite son at the plough, and casting her mantle over him,"—that is, the sculptured monument, or, as the sexton called it, "Máwsolem," under which he has had the misfortune to be buried. A great Malvern bathwoman, bringing a bathing-sheet to an unwilling patient, might have been the model for the thing. It is hideous beyond description, and in a refinement of ingenuity has been made uglier still by having the spaces between the pillars filled in with glass. The severe Scotch weather, it seems, was discoloring the marble. It is a pity that the zealous guardians of its beauty did not hold it precious enough to be boarded up altogether.

The house in which Burns spent the first eighteen months of his dreary life in Dumfries is now a common tenement-house at the lower end of a poor and narrow street. As I was reading the tablet let into the wall, bearing his name, a carpenter went by, carrying his box of tools slung on his shoulder.

"He only had three rooms there," said the man, "those three up there," pointing to the windows; "two rooms and a little kitchen at the back."

The house which is usually shown to strangers as his is now the home of the master of the industrial school, and is a comfortable little building joining the school. Here Burns lived for three years; and here, in a small chamber not more than twelve by fifteen feet in size, he died on the 21st of July, 1796, sadly harassed in his last moments by anxiety about money matters and about the approaching illness of his faithful Jean.

Opening from this room is a tiny closet, lighted by one window.

"They say he used to make up his poetry in here," said the servant-girl; "but I dare say it is only a supposeetion; still, it 'ud be a quiet place."

"They say there was a great lot o' papers up here when he died," she added, throwing open the narrow door of a ladder-like stairway that led up into the garret, "writin's that had been sent to him from all over the world, but nobody knew what become of them. Now that he's so much thought aboot, I wonder his widow did not keep them. But, ye know, the poor thing was just comin' to be ill; that was the last thing he wrote when he knew he was dyin', for some one to come and stay with her; and I dare say she was in such a sewither she did not know about anything."

The old stone stairs were winding and narrow,—painted now, and neatly carpeted, but worn into depressions here and there by the plodding of feet. Nothing in the house, above or below, spoke to me of Burns so much as did they. I stood silent and rapt on the landing, and saw him coming wearily up, that last time; after which he went no more out forever, till he was borne in the arms of men, and laid away in Saint Michael's graveyard to rest.

That night, at my lonely dinner in the King's Arms, I had the Edinburgh papers. There were in them three editorials headed with quotations from Burns's poems, and an account of the sale in Edinburgh, that week, of an autograph letter of his for ninety-four pounds!

Does he think sadly, even in heaven, how differently he might have done by himself and by earth, if earth had done for him then a tithe of what it does now? Does he know it? Does he care? And does he listen when, in lands he never saw, great poets sing of him in words simple and melodious as his own?

GLINTS IN AULD REEKIE.

As soon as one comes to know Edinburgh, he feels a gratitude to that old gentleman of Fife who is said to have invented the affectionate phrase "Auld Reekie." Perhaps there never was any such old gentleman; and perhaps he never did, as the legend narrates, regulate the hours of his family prayers, on summer evenings, by the thickening smoke which he could see rising from Edinburgh chimneys, when the cooking of suppers began.

"It's time now, bairns, to tak the beuks an' gang to our beds; for yonder's Auld Reekie, I see, putting on her nichtcap," are the words which the harmless little tradition puts into his mouth. They are wisely dated back to the reign of Charles II., a time from which none now speak to contradict; and they serve as well as any others to introduce and emphasize the epithet which, once heard, is not forgotten by a lover of Edinburgh, remaining always in his memory, like a pet name of one familiarly known.

It is not much the fashion of travellers to become attached to Edinburgh. Rome for antiquity, London for study and stir, Florence for art, Venice for art and enchantment combined,—all these have pilgrims who become worshippers, and return again and again to them, as the devout return to shrines. But few return thus to Edinburgh. It continually happens that people planning routes of travel are heard to say, "I have seen Edinburgh," pronouncing the word "seen" with a stress indicating a finality of completion. Nobody ever uses a phrase in that way about Rome or Venice. It is always, "We have been in," "spent a winter in," "a summer in," or "a month in" Rome, or Venice, or any of the rest; and the very tone and turn of the phrase tell the desire or purpose of another winter, or summer, or month in the remembered and longed-for place.

But Edinburgh has no splendors with which to woo and attract. She is "a penniless lass;" "wi' a lang pedigree," however,—as long and as splendid as the best, reaching back to King Arthur at least, and some say a thousand years farther, and assert that the rock on which her castle stands was a stronghold when Rome was a village. At any rate, there was a fortress there long before Edinburgh was a town, and that takes it back midway between the five hundredth and six hundredth year of our Lord. From that century down to this it was the centre of as glorious and terrible fighting and suffering as the world has ever seen. Kingly besieged and besiegers, prisoners, martyrs, men and women alike heroic, their presences throng each doorway still; and the very stones at a touch seem set ringing again with the echoes of their triumphs and their agonies.

To me, the castle is Edinburgh. Looking from the sunny south windows of Prince's Street across at its hoary front is like a wizard's miracle, by which dead centuries are rolled back, compressed into minutes. At the foot of its north precipices, where lay the lake in which, in the seventeenth century, royal swans floated and plebeian courtesans were ducked, now stretches a gay gardened meadow, through which flash daily railway trains. Their columns of blue smoke scale the rocks, coil after coil, but never reach the citadel summit, being tangled, spent, and lost in the tops of trees, which in their turn seem also to be green-plumed besiegers, ever climbing, climbing. For five days I looked out on this picture etched against a summer sky: in black, by night; in the morning, of soft sepia tints, or gray,—tower, battlement, wall, and roof, all in sky lines; below these the wild crags and precipices, a mosaic of grays, two hundred feet down, to a bright greensward dotted with white daisies. Set steadily to the sunrise, by a west wind which never stopped blowing for the whole five days, streamed out the flag. To have read on its folds, "Castelh-Mynyd-Agned," or "Castrum Puellarum," would not have seemed at any hour a surprise. There is nowhere a relic of antiquity which so dominates its whole environment as does this rock fortress. Its actuality is sovereign; its personality majestic. The thousands of modern people thronging up and down Prince's Street seem perpetrating an impertinent anachronism. The times are the castle's times still; all this nineteenth-century haberdashery and chatter is an inexplicable and insolent freak of interruption. Sitting at one's Prince's Street windows, one sees it not; overlooks it as meaningless and of no consequence. Instead, he sees the constable's son, in Bruce's day, coming down that two hundred feet of precipice, hand over hand, on a bit of rope ladder, to visit the "wench in town" with whom he was in love; and anon turning this love-lore of his to patriotic account, by leading Earl Douglas, with his thirty picked Scots, up the same precipices, in the same perilous fashion, to surprise the English garrison, which they did to such good purpose that in a few hours they retook the castle, the only one then left which Bruce had not recovered. Or, when morning and evening mists rise slowly up from the meadow, veil the hill, and float off in hazy wreaths from its summit, he fancies fagots and tar-barrels ablaze on the esplanade, and the beauteous Lady Glammis, with her white arms crossed on her breast, burning to death there, with eyes fixed on the windows of her husband's prison. Scores of other women with "fayre bodies" were burned alive there; men, too, their lovers and sons,—all for a crime of which no human soul ever was or could be guilty. Poor, blinded, superstitious earth, which heard and saw and permitted such things! Even to-day, when the ground is dug up on that accursed esplanade, there are found the ashes of these martyrs to the witchcraft madness.

That grand old master-gunner, too, of Cromwell's first following,—each sunset gun from the castle seemed to me in honor of his memory, and recalled his name. "May the devil blaw me into the air, if I lowse a cannon this day!" said he, when Charles's men bade him fire a salute in honor of the Restoration. Every other one of Cromwell's men in the garrison had turned false, and done ready service to the king's officers; but not so Browne. It was only by main force that he was dragged to his gun, and forced to fire it. Whether the gun were old, and its time had come to burst, or whether the splendid old Puritan slyly overweighed his charge, it is open to each man's preference to believe; but burst the gun did, and, taking the hero at his word, "shuites his bellie from him, and blew him quyte over the castle wall," says the old record. I make no doubt myself that it was just what the master-gunner intended.

Thirty years later there were many gunners in Edinburgh Castle as brave as he, or braver,—men who stood by their guns month after month, starving by inches and freezing; the snow lying knee-deep on the shattered bastions; every roof shelter blown to fragments; no fuel; their last well so low that the water was putrid; raw salt herrings the only food for the men, and for the officers oatmeal, stirred in the putrid water. This was the Duke of Gordon's doing, when he vowed to hold Edinburgh Castle for King James, if every other fortress in Scotland went over to William. When his last hope failed, and he gave his men permission to abandon the castle and go out to the enemy, if they chose, not a man would go. "Three cheers for his grace," they raised, with their poor starved voices, and swore they would stay as long as he did. From December to June they held out, and then surrendered, a handful of fifty ghastly, emaciated, tottering men. Pity they could not have known how much grander than victories such defeats as theirs would read by and by!

Hard by the castle was the duke's house, in Blair's Close; in this he was shut up prisoner, under strict guard. The steps up which he walked that day, for the first time in his life without his sword, are still there; his coronet, with a deer-hound on either side, in dingy stone carving, above the low door. It is one of the doorways worth haunting, in Edinburgh. Generations of Dukes of Gordon have trodden its threshold, from the swordless hero of 1689 down to the young lover who, in George the Third's day, went courting his duchess, over in Hyndford's Close, at the bottom of High Street. She was a famous beauty, daughter of Lady Maxwell; and thanks to one gossip and another, we know a good deal about her bringing-up. There was still living in Edinburgh, sixty years ago, an aged and courtly gentleman, who recollected well having seen her riding a sow in High Street; her sister running behind and thumping the beast with a stick. Duchesses are not made of such stuff in these days. It almost passes belief what one reads in old records of the ways and manners of Scottish nobility in the first half of the eighteenth century. These Maxwells' fine laces were always drying in the narrow passage from their front stair to their drawing-room; and their undergear hanging out on a pole from an upper window in full sight of passers-by, as is still the custom with the poverty-stricken people who live in Hyndford's Close.

On the same stair with the Maxwells lived the Countess Anne of Balcarres, mother of eleven children, the eldest of whom wrote "Auld Robin Gray." She was poor and proud, and a fierce Jacobite to the last. To be asked to drink tea in Countess Anne's bedchamber was great honor. The room was so small that the man-servant, John, gorgeous in the Balcarres livery, had to stand snugged up to the bedpost. Here, with one arm around the post, he stood like a statue, ready to hand the teakettle as it was needed. When the noble ladies differed about a date or a point of genealogy, John was appealed to, and often so far forgot his manners as to swear at the mention of assumers and pretenders to baronetcies.

There is an endless fascination in going from house to house, in their old wynds and closes, now. A price has to be paid for it,—bad smells, filth underfoot, and, very likely, volleys of ribald abuse from gin-loosened tongues right and left and high up overhead; but all this only emphasizes the picture, and makes one's mental processions of earls and countesses all the livelier and more vivid.

Some of these wynds are so narrow and dark that one hesitates about plunging into them. They seem little more than rifts between dungeons: seven, eight, and nine stories high, the black walls stretch up. If there is a tiny courtyard, it is like the bottom of a foul well; and looking to the hand's-breadth of sky visible above, it seems so far up and so dark blue, one half expects to see its stars glimmering at noonday. A single narrow winding stone stair is the only means of going up and down; and each floor being swarming full of wretched human beings, each room a tenement house in itself, of course this common stairway becomes a highway of contentions, the very battle-ground of the house. Progress up or down can be stopped at a second's notice; a single pair of elbows is a blockade. How sedan chairs were managed in these corkscrew crevices is a puzzle; yet we read that the ladies of quality went always in sedan chairs to balls and assemblies.

In the Stamp Office Close, now the refuge of soot-venders, old-clothes dealers, and hucksters of lowest degree, tramps, beggars, and skulkers of all sorts, still is locked tight every night a big carved door, at foot of the stair down which used to come stately Lady Eglintoune, the third, with her seven daughters, in fine array. It was one of the sights of the town to see the procession of their eight sedan chairs on the way to a dance. The countess herself was six feet tall, and her daughters not much below her; all strikingly handsome, and of such fine bearing that it went into the traditions of the century as the "Eglintoune air." There also went into the traditions of the century some details of the earl's wooing, which might better have been kept a secret between him and his father-in-law. The second Lady Eglintoune was ailing, and like to die, when Sir Archibald Kennedy arrived in Edinburgh, with his stalwart but beautiful daughter Susanna. She was much sought immediately; and Sir Archibald, in his perplexity among the many suitors, one day consulted his old friend Eglintoune. "Bide a wee, Sir Archy," replied the earl,—"bide a wee; my wife's very sickly." And so, by waiting, the fair Susanna became Countess of Eglintoune. It would seem as if Nature had some intent to punish the earl's impatient faithlessness to his sickly wife; for, year after year, seven years running, came a daughter, and no son, to the house of Eglintoune. At last the earl, with a readiness to ignore marital obligations at which his third countess need not have been surprised, bluntly threatened to divorce her if she bore him no heir. Promptly the spirited Susanna replied that nothing would please her better, provided he would give her back all she brought him. "Every penny of it, and welcome!" retorted the earl, supposing she referred to her fortune. "Na, na, my lord," replied the lady, "that winna do. Return me my youth, beauty, and virginity, and dismiss me when you please;" upon which the matter dropped. In the end, the earl fared better than he deserved, three sons being given him within the next five years.

For half a century Lady Eglintoune was a prominent figure in Scottish social life. Her comings and goings and doings were all chronicled, and handed down. It is even told that when Johnson and Boswell visited her at her country-place, she was so delighted with Johnson's conversation that she kissed him on parting,—from which we can argue her ladyship's liking for long words. She lived to be ninety-one, and amused herself in her last days by taming rats, of which she had a dozen or more in such subjection that at a tap on the oak wainscoting of her dining-room they came forth, joined her at her meal, and at a word of command retired again into the wainscot.

When twenty-first-century travellers go speiring among the dingy ruins of cities which are gay and fine now, they will not find relics and traces of such individualities as these. The eighteenth century left a most entertaining budget, which we of to-day are too busy and too well educated to equal. No chiel among us all has the time to take gossip notes of this century; and even if he did, they would be dull enough in comparison with those of the last.

Groping and rummaging in Hyndford's Close, one day, for recognizable traces of Lady Maxwell's house, we had the good fortune to encounter a thrifty housewife, of the better class, living there. She was coming home, with her market-basket on her arm. Seeing our eager scenting of the old carvings on lintels and sills, and overhearing our mention of the name of the Duchess of Gordon, she made bold to address us.

"It waur a strange place for the nobeelity to be livin' in, to be sure," she said. "I'm livin' mysil in ane o' the best of 'im, an' it's na mair space to 't than ud turn a cat. Ye're welcome to walk up, if ye like to see what their dwellin's waur like in the auld time. It's a self-contained stair ye see," she added with pride, as she marshalled us up a twisting stone stairway, so narrow that even one person, going alone, must go cautiously to avoid grazing elbows and shins on the stone walls, at every turn. "I couldna abide the place but for the self-contained stair: there's not many has them," she continued. "Mind yer heads! mind yer heads! There's a stoop!" she cried; but it was too late. We had reached, unwarned, a point in the winding stair where it was necessary to go bent half double; only a little child could have stood upright. With heads dizzy from the blow and eyes half blinded by the sudden darkness, we stumbled on, and brought out in a passage-way, perhaps three feet wide and ten long, from which opened four rooms: one the kitchen, a totally dark closet, not over six feet square; a tiny grate, a chair, table, and a bunk in the wall, where the servant slept, were all its furniture. The woman lighted a candle to show us how convenient was this bunk for the maid "to lie." Standing in the middle of the narrow passage, one could reach his head into kitchen, parlor, and both bedrooms without changing his position. The four rooms together would hardly have made one good-sized chamber. Nothing but its exquisite neatness and order saved the place from being insupportable! Even those would not save it when herring suppers should be broiling in the closet surnamed kitchen. Up a still smaller, narrower crevice in the wall led a second "self-contained stair," dark as midnight, and so low roofed there was no standing upright in it, even at the beginning. This led to what the landlady called the "lodgers' flairt." We had not courage to venture up, though she was exceedingly anxious to show us her seven good bedrooms, three double and four single, which were nightly filled with lodgers, at a shilling a night.

Only the "verra rayspectable," she said, came to lodge with her. Her husband was "verra pairticular." Trades-people from the country were the chief of their customers, "an' the same a-comin' for seven year, noo." No doubt she has as lively a pride, and gets as many satisfactions between these narrow walls, as did the lords and ladies of 1700. Evidently not the least of her satisfactions was the fact that those lords and ladies had lived there before her.

Nowhere are Auld Reekie's antitheses of new and old more emphasized than in the Cowgate. In 1530 it was an elegant suburb. The city walls even then extended to enclose it, and it was eloquently described, in an old divine's writings, as the place "ubi nihil est humile aut rusticum, sed omnia magnifica."

In one of its grassy lanes the Earl of Galloway built a mansion. His countess often went to pay visits to her neighbors, in great state, driving six horses; and it not infrequently happened that when her ladyship stepped into her coach, the leaders were standing opposite the door at which she intended to alight.

Here dwelt, in 1617, the famous "Tam o' the Cowgate," Earl of Haddington, boon companion of King James, who came often to dine with him, and gave him the familiar nickname of Tam. Tam was so rich he was vulgarly believed to have the philosopher's stone; but he himself once gave a more probable explanation of his wealth, saying that his only secret lay in two rules,—"never to put off till to-morrow that which could be done to-day," and "never to trust to another what his own hand could execute."

To-day there is not in all the world, outside the Jewish Ghetto of Rome, so loathly wretched a street as this same Cowgate. Even at high noon it is not always safe to walk through it; and there are many of its wynds into which no man would go without protection of the police. Simply to drive through it is harrowing. The place is indescribable. It seems a perpetual and insatiable carnival of vice and misery. The misery alone would be terrible enough to see; but the leering, juggling, insolent vice added makes it indeed hellish. Every curbstone, door-sill, alley mouth, window, swarms with faces out of which has gone every trace of self-respect or decency; babies' faces as bad as the worst, and the most aged faces worst of all. To pause on the sidewalk is to be surrounded, in a moment, by a dangerous crowd of half-naked boys and girls, whining, begging, elbowing, cursing, and fighting. Giving of an alms is like pouring oil on a fire. The whole gang is ablaze with envy and attack: the fierce and unscrupulous pillage of the seventeenth century is re-enacted in miniature in the Cowgate every day, when an injudicious stranger, passing through, throws a handful of pennies to the beggars. The general look of hopeless degradation in the spot is heightened by the great number of old-clothes shops along the whole line of the street. In the days when the Cowgate was an elegant suburb, the citizens were permitted by law to extend their upper stories seven feet into the street, provided they would build them of wood cut in the Borough Forest, a forest that harbored robbers dangerous to the town. These projecting upper stories are invaluable now to the old-clothes venders, who hang from them their hideous wares, in double and treble lines, fluttering over the heads and in the faces of passers-by; the wood of the Borough Forest thus, by a strange irony of fate, still continuing to harbor dangers to public welfare. If these close-packed tiers of dangling rags in the Cowgate were run out in a straight single line, they would be miles long; a sad beggars' arras to behold. The preponderance of tattered finery in it adds to its melancholy: shreds of damask; dirty lace; theatrical costumes; artificial flowers so crumpled, broken, and soiled that they would seem to have been trodden in gutters,—there was an indefinable horror in the thought that there could be even in the Cowgate a woman creature who could think herself adorned by such mockeries of blossoms. But I saw more than one poor soul look at them with longing eyes, finger them, haggle at the price, and walk away disappointed that she could not buy.

The quaint mottoes here and there in the grimy walls, built in when the Cowgate people were not only comfortable but pious, must serve often now to point bitter jests among the ungodly. On one wretched, reeking tenement is: "Oh, magnify the Lord with me, and let us exalt his name together. 1643." On another, "All my trist is in ye Lord."

A token I saw in the Cowgate of one life there not without hope and the capacity of enjoyment. It was in a small window, nine stories up from the ground, in a wynd so close that hands might be clasped from house to house across it. It was a tiny thing, but my eye fell on it with as much relief as on a rift of blue sky in a storm: it was a little green fern growing in a pot. Outside the window it stood, on a perilously narrow ledge. As I watched it I grew frightened, lest the wind should blow it down, or a vicious neighbor stone it off. It seemed the brave signal flying of a forlorn hope, of a dauntless, besieged soul that would never surrender; and I shall recollect it long after every other picture of the Cowgate scenes has grown dim.

The more respectable of the pawnbrokers' or second-hand-goods shops in Edinburgh are interesting places to rummage. If there were no other record of the slow decay and dwindling fortunes of the noble Scottish folk, it could be read in the great number of small dealers in relics of the olden time.

Old buckles and brooches and clan badges; chains, lockets, seals, rings; faded miniatures, on ivory or in mosaics, of women as far back as Mary's time, loved then as well as was ever Mary herself, but forgotten now as if they had never been; swords rusty, bent, battered, and stained; spoons with forgotten crests; punch-ladles worn smooth with the merry-makings of generations,—all these one may find in scores of little one-roomed shops, kept perhaps by aged dames with the very aroma of the antique Puritanism lingering about them still.

In such a room as this I found a Scotch pebble brooch with a quaint silver setting, reverently and cautiously locked in a glass case. On the back of it had been scratched, apparently with a pin, "Margret Fleming, from her brother." I bore it away with me triumphantly, sure that it had belonged to an ancestor of Pet Marjorie.

Almost as full of old-time atmosphere as the pawnbrokers' shops are the antiquarian bookstores. Here one may possess himself, if he likes, of well-thumbed volumes with heraldic crests on titlepages, dating back to the earliest reading done by noble earls and baronets in Scotland; even to the time when not to know how to read was no indelible disgrace. In one of these shops, on the day I bought Margret Fleming's brooch, I found an old torn copy of "Pet Marjorie." Speaking of Dr. Brown and Rab to the bookseller,—himself almost a relic of antiquity,—I was astonished and greatly amused to hear him reply: "It's a' a feection.... He can't write without it.... I knoo that darg.... A verra neece darg he was, but—a—a—a"—with a shake of the head—"it's a verra neece story, verra neece.... He wrote it up, up; not but that Rab was a verra neece darg. I knoo the darg wull."

Not a word of more definite disclaimer or contradiction could I win from the canny old Scot. But to have hastily called the whole story a lee, from beginning to end, would hardly have shaken one's confidence in it so much as did the thoughtful deliberation of his "He was a verra neece darg. I knoo the darg wull."

One of our "cawdies," during our stay in Edinburgh, was a remarkable fellow. After being for twenty years a gentleman's servant, he had turned his back on aristocracy, and betaken himself to the streets for a living; driving cabs, or piloting strangers around the city, as might be. But his earlier habits of good behavior were strong in him still, and came to the surface quickly in associations which revived them. His conversation reminded us forcibly of somebody's excellent saying that Scotland would always be Scott-land. Not a line of Scott's novels which this vagabond cawdie did not seemingly know by heart. Scottish history, too, he had at his tongue's end, and its most familiar episodes sounded new and entertaining as he phrased them. Even the death of Queen Mary seemed freshly stated, as he put it, when, after summing up the cruelties she had experienced at the hands of Elizabeth, he wound up with, "And finally she beheaded her, and that was the last of her,"—a succinctness of close which some of Mary's historians would have done well to simulate.

Of Jeanie Deans and Dumbiedikes he spoke as of old acquaintances. He pointed out a spot in the misty blue distance where was Dumbiedikes' house, where Jeanie's sweetheart dwelt, and where the road lay on which Jeanie went to London.

"It was there the old road to London lay; and wouldn't you think it more natural, sir, that it was that way she went, and it was there she met Dumbiedikes, and he gave her the purse? I'll always maintain, sir, that it was there she got it."

Of the two women, Jeanie Deans and Mary Queen of Scots, Jeanie was evidently the vivider and more real in his thoughts.

The second day of our stay in Edinburgh was a gay day in the castle. The 71st Highlanders had just returned from a twelvemonth's stay at Gibraltar. It was people's day. Everywhere the bronzed, tired, happy-looking fellows, in their smartened uniforms, were to be encountered, strolling, lounging, sitting with sweethearts or wives,—more of the former than the latter. It struck me also that the women were less good-looking than the men; but they were all beautified by happiness, and the merry sounds of their laughter, and the rumble of skittles playing filled all the place. Inside the castle, the room in which the regalia were on exhibition was thronged with country people, gazing reverently on its splendors.

"Keep yer eye on't, as ye walk by, an' mark the changes o' 't," I heard one old lady say to her husband, whose wandering gaze seemed to her neglectful of the opportunity.

A few gay-dressed women, escorted by officers, held themselves apart from the soldiers' sweethearting, and were disposed, I thought, to look a little scornfully on it. The soldiers did not seem to mind the affront, if they saw it; no doubt, they thought their own sweethearts far the better looking, and if they had ever heard of it would have quoted with hearty good-will the old ballad,—

Most picturesque of all the figures to be seen in Edinburgh are the Newhaven fishwives. With short, full blue cloth petticoats, reaching barely to their ankles; white blouses and gay kerchiefs; big, long-sleeved cloaks of the same blue cloth, fastened at the throat, but flying loose, sleeves and all, as if thrown on in haste; the girls bareheaded; the married women with white caps, standing up stiff and straight in a point on the top of the head; two big wickerwork creels, one above the other, full of fish, packed securely, on their broad shoulders, and held in place by a stout leather strap passing round their foreheads, they pull along at a steady, striding gait, up hill and down, carrying weights that it taxes a man's strength merely to lift. In fact, it is a fishwife's boast that she will run with a weight which it takes two men to put on her back. By reason of this great strength on the part of the women, and their immemorial habit of exercising it; perhaps also from other causes far back in the early days of Jutland, where these curious Newhaven fishing-folk are said to have originated,—it has come about that the Newhaven men are a singularly docile and submissive race. The wives keep all the money which they receive for the fish, and the husbands take what is given them,—a singular reversion of the situation in most communities. I did not believe this when it was told me; so I stopped three fishwives one day, and without mincing matters put the question direct to them. Two of them were young, one old. The young women laughed saucily, and the old woman smiled; but they all replied unhesitatingly, that they had the spending of all the money.

"It's a' spent i' the hoos," said one, anxious not to be thought too selfish,—"it's a' spent i' the hoos. The men, they cam home an' tak their sleep, an' then they'll be aff agen."

"It 'ud never do for the husbands to stoop in tha city, an' be spendin' a' the money," added the old woman, with severe emphasis.

I learned afterward that on the present system of buying and selling the fish, the fishermen do receive from their labor an income independent of their wives. They are the first sellers of the fish,—selling them in quantity to the wholesale dealers, who sell in turn at auction to the "retail trade," represented by the wives. This seems an unjust system, and is much resented by both husbands and wives; but it has been established by law, and there is no help for it. It came in with the introduction of the steam trawlers. "They're the deestrooction o' the place," said one of the fish women. "A mon canna go oot wi' his lines an' mak a livin' noo. They just drag everything; they tak a' the broods; they're dooin' a worrld o' harrm. There's somethin' a dooin' aboot it in the House o' Commons, noo, but a canna till hoo it wull go. They ull be the deestrooction o' this place, if they're na pit stop to." And she shook her fist vindictively at a puffing trawler which had just pushed away from the wharf.

Whoever would see the Newhaven fishwives at their best must be on the Newhaven wharf by seven o'clock in the morning, on a day when the trawlers come in and the fish is sold. The scene is a study for a painter.

The fish are in long, narrow boxes, on the wharf, ranged at the base of the sea wall; some sorted out, in piles, each kind by itself: skates, with their long tails, which look vicious, as if they could kick; hake, witches, brill, sole, flounders, huge catfish, crayfish, and herrings, by the ton. The wall is crowded with men, Edinburgh fishmongers, come to buy cheap on the spot. The wall is not over two feet wide; and here they stand, lean over, jostle, slip by to right and left of each other, and run up and down in their eager haste to catch the eye of one auctioneer, or to get first speech with another. The wharf is crowded with women,—an army in blue, two hundred, three hundred, at a time; white caps bobbing, elbows thrusting, shrill voices crying, fiery blue eyes shining, it is a sight worth going to Scotland for. If one has had an affection for Christie Johnstone, it is a delightful return of his old admiration for her. A dozen faces which might be Christie's own are flashing up from the crowd; one understands on the instant how that best of good stories came to be written. A man with eyes in his head and a pen in his hand could not have done less. Such fire, such honesty, such splendor of vitality, kindle the women's faces. To spend a few days among them would be to see Christie Johnstone dramatized on all sides.

On the morning when I drove out from Edinburgh to see this scene, a Scotch mist was simmering down,—so warm that at first it seemed of no consequence whatever, so cold that all of a sudden one found himself pierced through and through with icy shivers. This is the universal quality of a Scotch mist or drizzle.

The Newhaven wharf is a narrow pier running out to sea. On one side lay the steam trawlers, which had just unloaded their freight; on the other side, on the narrow, rampart-like wall of stone, swarmed the fishmonger men. In this line I took my place, and the chances of the scramble. Immediately the jolly fishwives caught sight of me, and began to nod and smile. They knew very well I was there to "speir" at them.

"Ye'll tak cauld!" cried one motherly old soul, with her white hair blowing wildly about almost enough to lift the cap off her head. "Com doon! Ye'll tak cauld."

I smiled, and pointed to my water-proof cloak, down which, it must be admitted, the "mist" was trickling in streams, while the cloak itself flapped in the wind like a loose sail. She shook her head scornfully.

"It's a grat plass to tak cauld!" she cried. "Ye'll doo wull to com doon."

There were three auctioneers: one, a handsome, fair-haired, blue-eyed young fellow, was plainly a favorite with the women. They flocked after him as he passed from one to another of the different lots of fish. They crowded in close circles around him, three and four deep; pushing, struggling, rising on tiptoes to look over each other's shoulders and get sight of the fish.

"What's offered for this lot o' fine herrings? One! One and sax! Thrippence ha'! Going, going, gone!" rang above all the clatter and chatter of the women's tongues. It was so swift that it seemed over before it was fairly begun; and the surging circles had moved along to a new spot and a new trade. The eyes of the women were fixed on the auctioneer's eyes; they beckoned; they shook forefingers at him; now and then a tall, stalwart one, reaching over less able-bodied comrades, took him by the shoulder, and compelled him to turn her way; one, most fearless of all, literally gripped him by the ear and pulled his head around, shrieking out her bid. When the pressure got unbearable, the young fellow would shake himself like a Newfoundland dog, and, laughing good-naturedly, whirl his arms wide round to clear a breathing space; the women would fall back a pace or two, but in a moment the rings would close up again, tighter than ever.

The efforts of those in the outer ring to break through or see over the inner ones were droll. Arms and hands and heads seemed fairly interlinked and interwoven. Sometimes a pair of hands would come into sight, pushing their way between two bodies, low down,—just the two hands, nothing more, breaking way for themselves, as if in a thicket of underbrush; presently the arms followed; and then, with a quick thrust of the arms to right and left, the space would be widened enough to let in the head, and when that was fairly through the victory was won. Straightening herself with a big leap, the woman bounded in front of the couple she had so skilfully separated, and a buzzing "bicker" of angry words would rise for a moment; but there was no time to waste in bad temper where bargains were to be made or lost in the twinkling of an eye.

An old sailor, who stood near me on the wall, twice saved me from going backwards into the sea, in my hasty efforts to better my standpoint. He also seemed to be there simply as a spectator, and I asked him how the women knew what they were buying; buying, as they did, by the pile or the box.

"Oh, they'll giss, verra near," he said; "they've an eye on the fish sense they're bawn. God knows it's verra little they mak," he added, "an' they'll carry's much's two men o' us can lift. They're extrawnery strang."

As a lot of catfish were thrown down at our feet, he looked at them with a shudder and exclaimed,—

"I'd no eat that."

"Why not?" said I. "Are they not good?"

"Ah, I'd no eat it," he replied, with a look of superstitious terror spreading over his face. "It doesna look richt."

A fresh trawler came in just as the auction had nearly ended. The excitement renewed itself fiercely. The crowd surged over to the opposite side of the pier, and a Babel of voices arose. The skipper was short and fat, and in his dripping oilskin suit looked like a cross between a catfish and a frog.

"Here, you Rob," shouted the auctioneer, "what do you add to this fine lot o' herrin'?"

"Herring be d——d!" growled the skipper, out of temper, for some reason of his own; at which a whirring sound of ejaculated disapprobation burst from the women's lips.

The fish were in great tanks on the deck. Quickly the sailors dipped up pails of the sea-water, dashed it over them, and piled them into baskets, in shining, slippery masses: the whole load was on the pier, sorted, and sold in a few minutes.

Then the women settled down to the work of assorting and packing up their fish. One after another they shouldered their creels and set off for Edinburgh. They seemed to have much paying back and forth of silver among themselves, one small piece of silver that I noticed actually travelling through four different hands in the five minutes during which I watched it. Each woman wore under her apron, in front, a sort of apron-like bag, in which she carried her money. There was evidently rivalry among them. They spied closely on each other's loads, and did some trafficking and exchange before they set off. One poor old creature had bought only a few crayfish, and as she lifted her creel to her back, and crawled away, the women standing by looked over into her basket, and laughed and jeered at her; but she gave no sign of hearing a word they said.

Some of them were greatly discontented with their purchases when they came to examine them closely, especially one woman who had bought a box of flounders. She emptied them on the ground, and sorted the few big ones, which had been artfully laid on the top; then, putting the rest, which were all small, in a pile by themselves, she pointed contemptuously to the contrast, and, with a toss of her head, ran after the auctioneer, and led him by the sleeve back to the spot where her fish lay. She was as fierce as Christie herself could have been at the imposition. She had paid the price for big flounders, and had got small ones. The auctioneer opened his book and took out his pencil to correct the entry which had been made against her.

"Wull, tak aff saxpence," he said.

"Na! na!" cried she. "They're too dear at seven saxpence."

"Wull, tak aff a saxpence; it is written noo,—seven shillin'."

She nodded, and began packing up the flounders.

"Will you make something on them at that price?" I asked her.

"Wull, I'll mak me money back," she replied; but her eyes twinkled, and I fancy she had got a very good bargain, as bargains go in Newhaven; it being thought there a good day's work to clear three shillings,—a pitiful sum, when a woman, to earn it, must trudge from Newhaven to Edinburgh (two miles) with a hundred pounds of fish on her back, and then toil up and down Edinburgh hills selling it from door to door. One shilling on every pound is the auctioneer's fee. He has all the women's names in his book, and it is safe to trust them; they never seek to cheat, or even to put off paying. "They'd rather pay than not," the blue-eyed auctioneer said to me. "They're the honestest folks i' the warld."

As the last group was dispersing, one old woman, evidently in a state of fierce anger, approached and poured out a torrent of Scotch as bewildering and as unintelligible to me as if it had been Chinese. Her companions gazed at her in astonishment; presently they began to reply, and in a few seconds there was as fine a "rippet" going on as could have been heard in Cowgate in Tam's day. At last a woman of near her own age sprang forward, and approaching her with a determined face, lifted her right hand with an authoritative gesture, and said in vehement indignation, which reminded me of Christie again,—

"Keep yersil, an' haud yer tongue, noo!"

"What is she saying?" I asked. "What is the matter?"

"Eh, it is jist nathin' at a'," she replied. "She's thet angry, she doesna knaw hersil."

The faces of the Newhaven women are full of beauty, even those of the old women: their blue eyes are bright and laughing, long after the sea wind and sun have tanned and shrivelled their skins and bleached their hair. Blue eyes and yellow hair are the predominant type; but there are some faces with dark hazel eyes of rare beauty and very dark hair,—still more beautiful,—which, spite of its darkness, shows glints of red in the sun. The dark blue of their gowns and cloaks is the best color-frame and setting their faces could have; the bunched fulness of the petticoat is saved from looking clumsy by being so short, and the cloaks are in themselves graceful garments. The walking in a bent posture, with such heavy loads on the back, has given to all the women an abnormal breadth of hip, which would be hideous in any other dress than their own. This is so noticeable that I thought perhaps they wore under their skirts, to set them out, a roll, such as is worn by some of the Bavarian peasants. But when I asked one of the women, she replied,—

"Na, na, jist the flannel; a' tuckit."

"Tucked all the way up to the belt?" said I.

"Na, na," laughing as if that were a folly never conceived of,—"na, na." And in a twinkling she whipped her petticoat high up, to show me the under petticoat, of the same heavy blue cloth, tucked only a few inches deep. Her massive hips alone were responsible for the strange contour of her figure.

The last person to leave the wharf was a young man with a creel of fish on his back. My friend the sailor glanced at him with contempt.

"There's the only man in all Scotland that 'ud be seen carryin' a creel o' fish on his back like a woman," said he. "He's na pride aboot him."

"But why shouldn't men carry creels?" I asked. "I'm sure it is very hard work for women."

The sailor eyed me for a moment perplexedly, and then as if it were waste of words to undertake to explain self-evident propositions, resumed,—

"He worked at it when he was a boy, with his mother; an' now he's no pride left. There's the whole village been at him to get a barrow; but he'll not do't. He's na pride aboot him."

What an interesting addition it would be to the statistics of foods eaten by different peoples to collect the statistics of the different foods with which pride's hunger is satisfied in different countries! Its stomach has as many and opposite standards as the human digestive apparatus. It is, like everything else, all and only a question of climate. Not a nabob anywhere who gets more daily satisfaction out of despising his neighbors than the Newhaven fishermen do out of their conscious superiority to this poor soul, who lugs his fish in a basket on his back like a woman, and has "na pride aboot him."

If I had had time and opportunity to probe one layer farther down in Newhaven society, no doubt I should have come upon something which even this pariah, the fish-carrying man, would scorn to be seen doing.