We spent the evening in the public-room sitting near the fire. One by one the villagers dropped in, each man ordering his toddy and spending an hour or two over a very small glass. The evenings had been spent in that way in that place for a hundred years. We seemed to be in the atmosphere of “long ago.” A middle-aged Scotchman, whose name was pronounced, very broadly, “Fronk,” seemed to feel the responsibility of entertaining us. He sang, very sweetly I thought, a song by Lady Nairne, “The Auld Hoose,” and recited with fine appreciation the lines of Burns’s “Lament for James, Earl of Glencairn,” “To a Mouse,” “To a Louse,” and other poems. He related how Burns once helped a friend out of a dilemma. Three women had been buried side by side. The son of one of them wished to put an inscription on his mother’s tombstone, but the sexton could not remember which grave was hers. Burns solved the problem by suggesting these lines:—
| “Here, or there, or thereaboots, Lies the body of Janet Coutts, But here, or there, or whereaboots, Nane can tell Till Janet rises and tells hersel.” |
Our landlady assured us that Fronk “had the bluid o’ Douglas in his veins,” but he was now only a poor “ne’er-do-weel,” picking up “a bit shillin’” now and then. But he loved Bobbie Burns.
After the evening’s entertainment we were shown to a tiny bedroom. Over the horrors upstairs I must draw the veil of charity, only remarking that if I ever go to Ecclefechan again I shall seek out a nice soft pile of old scrap-iron for a couch, rather than risk another night on one of those beds.
Of course we visited the birthplace of Carlyle, which is now one of the “restored” show places, and an interesting one. We also went to the graveyard to see the tomb of Carlyle. Here we were conducted by an old woman, nearly ninety years of age, very poor and feeble, who had lived in the village all her days. We asked if she had ever seen Carlyle. “Oh, yes,” she replied, wearily, “I hae seen ’im. He was a coo-rious mon.” Then brightening she added, with a smile that revealed her heart of hearts, “But we a’ love Bobbie Burns.” And so we found it throughout Scotland. The feeble old woman and the dissipated wanderer shared with the intelligent and cultivated classes a deep-seated and genuine love for their own peasant poet, whom they invariably called, affectionately, “Bobbie.”
| THE BURNS MONUMENT, AYRSHIRE |
It was not long after this that we had occasion to visit the land of Burns, for a trip through Scotland, even when undertaken primarily for the sake of Scott landmarks, as ours was, would scarcely be possible without many glimpses of the places made famous by the elder and less cultured but not less beloved poet. Scott’s intimacy with Adam Ferguson, the son of the distinguished Dr. Adam Ferguson, was the means of his introduction to the best literary society in Edinburgh, and it was at the house of the latter, that Scott, then a boy of fifteen, met Burns for the first and only time. He attracted the notice of the elder poet by promptly naming the author of a poem which Burns had quoted, when no one else in the room could give the information. It is a far cry from the aristocratic quarters of Dr. Ferguson to the tavern in the Canongate where the “Crochallan Fencibles” used to meet, but here the lines crossed again, for to this resort for convivial souls Burns came to enjoy the bacchanalian revels known as “High Jinks,” in the same way as did Andrew Crosbie, the original of Scott’s fictitious Paulus Pleydell.
We went to the old town of Dumfries to see a number of places described by Scott in “Guy Mannering,” “Redgauntlet,” and other novels, and found ourselves in the very heart of the Burns country. In the center of High Street stands the old Midsteeple in one room of which the original Effie Deans, whose real name was Isabel Walker, was tried for child murder. Here the real Jeanie Deans refused to tell a lie to save her sister’s life, afterward walking to London to secure her pardon. Almost around the corner is the house where Burns’s Jean lived, and where “Bobbie” died. In the same town is the churchyard of St. Michaels where Burns lies buried in a handsome “muselum,” as one of the natives informed us.
Out on the road toward the old church of Kirkpatrick Irongray, where Scott erected a monument to Helen Walker, the prototype of Jeanie Deans, is a small remnant of the house once occupied by that heroine. In the same general direction but a little farther to the north, on the banks of the river Nith, is Ellisland, where Burns attempted to manage a farm, attend to the duties of an excise officer, and write poetry, all at the same time. Out of the last came “Tam o’ Shanter,” but the other two “attempts” were failures.