of
instinct, or even sometimes, and with some minds, to a state very
little superior to mere machinery. This day--the first Sunday of
May--a breezy, blue-skied noon some time about the beginning, and a
hoary morning and calm sunny day about the end, of autumn--these, time
out of mind, have been with me a kind of holiday.... We know nothing,
or next to nothing of the substance or structure of our souls, so
cannot account for those seeming caprices in them, that we should be
particularly pleased with this thing, or struck with that, which on
minds of a different cast makes no extraordinary impression. I have
some favourite flowers in spring, among which are the mountain-daisy,
the harebell, the fox-glove, the wild-brier rose, the budding birch,
and the hoary hawthorn, that I view and hang over with particular
delight. I never hear the loud, solitary whistle of the curlew in a
summer noon, or the wild mixing cadence of a troop of gray plovers (p. 101)
in an autumnal morning, without feeling an elevation of soul like the
enthusiasm of devotion or poetry. Tell me, my dear friend, to what can
this be owing? Are we a piece of machinery, which, like the AEolian
harp, passive, takes the impression of the passing accident? Or do
these workings argue something within us above the trodden clod? I own
myself partial to such proofs of those awful and important realities--a
God that made all things--man's immaterial and immortal nature--and a
world of weal or woe beyond death and the grave!"

On reading this beautiful and suggestive letter, an ornithologist
remarked that Burns had made a mistake in a fact of natural history.
It is not the 'gray plover,' but the golden, whose music is heard on
the moors in autumn. The gray plover, our accurate observer remarks,
is a winter shore bird, found only at that season and in that habitat,
in this country.

It was not till about the middle of 1789 that the farm-house of
Ellisland was finished, and that he and his family, leaving the Isle,
went to live in it. When all was ready, Burns bade his servant, Betty
Smith, take a bowl of salt, and place the Family Bible on the top of
it, and, bearing these, walk first into the new house and possess it.
He himself, with his wife on his arm, followed Betty and the Bible and
the salt, and so they entered their new abode. Burns delighted to keep
up old-world _freits_ or usages like this. It was either on this
occasion, or on his bringing Mrs. Burns to the