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
"Wee sleekit, cow'rin', tim'rous beastie,"
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,
"Wee, modest, crimson-tippèd flower,"
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,
"Some thinkin' on their sins, an' some on their claes,"
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.
"Ye banks and braes and streams around
The castle o' Montgomery,
Green be your woods and fair your flowers,
Your waters never drumlie!
There simmer first unfauld her robes,
And there the langest tarry,
For there I took the last fareweel
O' my sweet Highland Mary."
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.
"The gossip keekit in his loof;
Quo' scho, 'Wha lives will see the proof,--
This waly boy will be nae coof;
I think we'll ca' him Robin.'"
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.
"I doubt na, frien', ye'll think ye'r nae sheep-shank
When ye are streekit o'er frae bank to bank,"
sneers the Auld; and
"Will your poor, narrow foot-path of a street,
Where twa wheelbarrows tremble when they meet,
Your ruined, formless bulk o' stane and lime,
Compare wi' bonny brigs o' modern time?"
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
"Tam was glorious,
O'er a' the ills o' life victorious,"
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
"Gat planted unco richt."
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'!"