If all gipsy predictions were as well fulfilled as this concerning the poet, the dark-skinned race assuredly would be far sought and courted.
A few strides beyond the stream his grey mare had to carry Tam past a dark, uncanny spot—“the cairn whare hunters fand the murdered bairn.” It was covered then with trees, and one of them still stands marking the place. To the left of the old road here, and hard by the newer highway, lies the humble cottage, of one storey, where Robert Burns was born. It has been considerably altered since then, having been used until recently as an alehouse, and further accommodation having been added at either end. But enough of the interior remains untouched to allow of its original aspect being realised. The house is the usual “but and ben,” built of natural stones and clay, and neatly whitewashed and thatched. In the “but,” the apartment to the left on entering from the road, there is little alteration; and it was here, in the recessed bed in the wall, that the poet first saw light. The plain deal dresser, with dish-rack above, remains the same, and the small, square, deep-set window still looks out behind, over the fields his father cultivated. An old mahogany press with drawers still stands next the bed; the floor is paved with irregular flags; and the open fireplace, with roomy, projecting chimney, occupies the gable. An extra door has been driven through the south-east corner to allow the profane crowd to pass through, and a larger window has been opened towards the road that they may see to scratch their names in the visitors’ book; but the rest of the apartment, towards the back, is little changed, if at all, since the eventful night when “Januar’ winds blew hansel in on Robin.”
The hour of his ride was too dark, however, for the galloping farmer to see so far over the fields. A weirder sight was in store for him.
A few hundred yards farther on, when, by a well which is still flowing, he had passed the thorn, now vanished, where “Mungo’s mither hanged hersel,” just as the road plunged down along the woody banks of Doon, there, a little to his left,
glimmering through the groaning trees
Kirk Alloway seemed in a bleeze.
The grey walls of the little kirk are standing yet among the graves, though the last rafters of the ruined roof were carried off long since to be carved into mementos. The tombs of Lord Alloway’s family occupy one end of the interior, and a partition wall has been built dividing off that portion, but otherwise the place remains unchanged. The bell still hangs above the eastern gable, and under it remains the little window with a thick mullion, the “winnock bunker” in which the astonished farmer, sitting on his mare, and looking through another opening in the side wall, saw the queer musician ensconced.
A more eerie spot on a stormy night could hardly be imagined, the trees shrieking and groaning around, the Doon roaring in the darkness far below, while the thunder crashed overhead, and the lurid glare of lightning ever and again lit up the ruin. But with the unearthly accessories of warlocks and witches, corpse-lights and open coffins, with the screech of the pipes, and grotesque contortions of the dancers, the place must pass comparison in horror. Yet, inspired by “bold John Barleycorn,” the farmer stared eagerly in on the revels, till, fairly forgetting himself in the height of his admiration, he must shout out “Weel dune, Cutty Sark!” Then, in a moment, as every reader is aware, the lights went out, the pipes stopped, and the wrathful revellers streamed after him like angry bees. A few bounds of his mare down that narrow, winding, and rather dangerous road would carry Tam to the bridge, and the clatter of terrified Maggie’s hoofs as she plunged off desperately through the trees seems to echo in the hollow way yet. All the world knows how she carried her master in safety across the keystone of the bridge at the cost of her own grey tail. The feat was no easy one, for the single arch (still spanning the river there) was high and steep and narrow.
Beyond the Doon the old road rises inland, bowered high with ash and saugh trees, to the open country; and Tam, pale and sober no doubt, but breathing freer, had still twelve long miles before him to the far side of Kirkoswald in Carrick, where sat his wife—
Gathering her brows like gathering storm,
Nursing her wrath to keep it warm.