he
reapers!

VISIT TO A SPOT CONNECTED WITH THE BIOGRAPHY OF BURNS.

Having occasion to spend a few days of the beautiful July of the
present year in the lower part of Nithsdale, I felt tempted to bestow
a forenoon upon an effort to discover and examine a particular spot in
the district connected with the history of the poet Burns, but
respecting which a doubt has till lately existed. The subject was the
more excitingly placed before me, by my seeing every morning, from my
bedroom windows, the smiling farmstead of Ellisland, which the poet
built, and where he spent more than four years of his life. Daily
beholding his simple home, and the fields he had tilled, I felt a
revived interest in his sad history and everything associated with it.

All the readers of Burns are of course acquainted with his extravagant
Bacchanalian lyric, beginning--

O Willie brewed a peck o' maut,
And Rab and Allan cam to prie;
Three blither hearts that lee-lang night
Ye wadna find in Christendie.

It was well known that the affair described was a real one--that the
Willie who gave the entertainment was Mr William Nicol, a master in
the High School of Edinburgh--Rab, the poet himself--and Allan, a
certain Mr Masterton, likewise of the Edinburgh High School: three
merry-hearted men, of remarkable talents and many other good
properties, but who, unfortunately, were all of them too liable to the
seductions of the 'barley-bree.' That such was the scene, and such the
actors, we had learned from Burns himself, who thus annotated the song
in a musical collection: 'This air is Masterton's; the song mine. The
occasion of it was this: Mr William Nicol, of the High School,
Edinburgh, during the autumn vacation being at Moffat, honest
Allan--who was at that time on a visit to Dalswinton--and I went to
pay Nicol a visit. We had such a joyous meeting, that Mr Masterton and
I agreed, each in our own way, that we should celebrate the business.'
That is to say, Burns undertook to compose a song descriptive of the
merry encounter, while Mr Masterton, who was an amateur musician,
should compose an appropriate air. So far there seems to be little
obscurity about the matter. The locality pointed out is the well-known
spa village of Moffat, situated among the hills of Annandale, about
twenty miles from Ellisland. Nicol had had a lodging there, in which
to enjoy his few weeks of autumn vacation; Burns and Masterton--the
one from El