The black'ning trains o'craws to their repose:——"
And at the end, fed perhaps by the adulation of their faces, as well as their spoken words, he laid some open flattery to himself upon the way he'd been received in town and at the noise his name was making there at the time, and stirred Nancy's sense of humor, which, Heaven is a witness, needed little to move it at any time.
"A'weel, a'weel," she said at length, "I make verses myself, Mr. Burns."
"Say you so!" he cried; "and that's a surprise to me! Would you word us one of your poems?" he asked, laughingly.
"I sing mine," she says, going over to the spinet.
"And that's finer still!" he cried.
"They're not like yours," an apology in her voice; "just off-hand rhymes like, that come to my head on the moment. If you could sooth me Bonnie Dundee now, I might rhyme something to it," and the minute he began, she said:
"Oh! I know that—'tis an old tune, like this"—and striking a chord or two, she was off before the rest had any guess of her intention, with a merry devil in her eye and her face glowing like a flower in the firelight:
"At 'The King's Arms' in Mauchline, Rab Burns said to me,
'I'm just back from Edinbro' as you may see,