|

VISITS BUBNS'S BIRTHPLACE,

Doon, and the scene of Tam o’ Shanter’s headlong ride. 1826.
With a pang of disillusion he found the church so small that er. 22.
Cuttie-Sark and her hellish legion can have had scanty space
for their capering, while the distance to the middle of the
old bridge, and the length of the furious immortal chase, can
have been no more than one hundred yards. The party on
this occasion were accompanied by a small manufacturer
from Paisley, who cared little for the genius of the place,
and found Cobden’s spirit of hero-worship tiresome. ¢ Our
worthy Paisley friend remarked to us, as we leaned over the
Bridge of Doon, and as its impetuous stream rushed beneath
us, ‘How shamefully,’ said he, ¢is the water-power of this
country suffered to run to waste : here is the force of twenty
horses running completely idle.” He did not relish groping
among ruins and tombstones at midnight, and was particularly
 solicitous that we should leave matters of discussion
antil we reached Burns’s birthplace, where he understood
that they kept the best whiskey in that vicinity.” To
Burns’s birthplace at length they came, where at first their
reception was not cordial. “But my worthy friend from
Paisley had not forgotten the whiskey; and so, tapping the
chin of the old dame with his forefinger, he bade her bring a
half-mutchkin of the best, ‘to set the wheels going,’ as he
termed it, and, having poured out a glass for the hostess,
which she swallowed, I was pleased to find that it did set
the wheels of hex tongue going. ‘Ye would maybe like to
gang and see the verra spot where poor Robbie was borned,’
she said, and we instantly begged her to show it to us. She
book us along a very short passage, and into a decent-looking
kitchen with a good fire. There was a curtain hung from
the ceiling to the floor, which appeared to cover one part of
the wall. She drew aside the curtain, and it disclosed a
bed in a recess of the wall, and a man who had been hidden
in the clothes first pub his head out and looked round in