ile and silly; and his verdict
as a poetical one was correct. Still, considered as a song, this artless
effusion possessed one merit of which he himself was probably not
conscious: it was inspired by his feeling and not by his reading, by the
warmth and purity of his love of Nelly Kilpatrick, and not by his
admiration of any amorous ditty in his collection of English songs. It
was a poor thing, but it was certainly his own, and nowhere more so than
in its recognition of the womanly personality of its heroine:--

"And then there's something in her gait
Gars ony dress look weel."

This touch of nature, which no modish artist would have attempted,
marked the hand of one who painted from the life.

William Burness struggled along for twelve years at Mount Oliphant, and
then removed to Lochlea, in the parish of Tarbolton. Here he rented a
larger farm, the soil of which promised a surer maintenance for himself
and the hostages he had given to Fortune. And there these loving
hostages began to put away childish things, and to become men and women.
They were cheerful, in spite of the frugality which their poverty
imposed upon them; and were merry in their simple homely way, singing
and dancing among themselves and among their friendly neighbors. Their
hearts expanded in the healthy air about them, particularly the heart of
Robert, which turned to thoughts of love,--not lightly, as in his boyish
fancy for Nelly Kilpatrick, but seriously, as beseemed a man; for he was
now in his nineteenth year, and as conscious of what he was to woman as
of what woman was to him. A born lover, and a born poet, he discovered
himself and his song at Tarbolton. The custom of the country and the
time sanctioned a freedom of manners, and a frequency of meeting on the
part of rustic amorists, of which he was not slow to avail himself. The
love affairs of the Scottish peasantry are thus described by one of his
biographers:--"The young farmer or plowman, after his day of exhausting
toil, would proceed to the home of his mistress, one, two, three, or
more miles distant, there signal her to the door, and then the pair
would seat themselves in the barn for an hour or two's conversation."
Burns practiced this mode of courtship, which was the only one open to
him, and among the only women whom he knew at Tarbolton. "He made no
distinction between the farmer's own daughters and those who acted as
his servants, the fact after all being that the se