reets and alleys. His life in Dumfries was not what one
could wish it might have been for his sake; for though it was not
without its hours of happiness, its unhappy days were many, and of a
darker kind than he had hitherto encountered. They were monotonous, they
were wearisome, they were humiliating. They could not be other than
humiliating to a man of his proud, impulsive spirit, who, schooling
himself to prudence on account of his wife and children, was not always
prudent in his speech. Who indeed could be, unless he were a mean,
cowardly creature, in the storm and stress of the great Revolution with
which France was then convulsed? His utterances, whatever they may have
been, were magnified to his official and social disadvantage, and he was
greatly troubled. He felt his disfavor with the people of Dumfries,--as
he could not help showing to one of his friends, who, riding into the
town on a fine summer evening to attend a county ball, saw him walking
alone on the shady side of the principal street, while the other side
was crowded with ladies and gentlemen who seemed unwilling to recognize
him. This friend dismounted, and joining him, proposed that they should
cross the street. "Nay, nay, my young friend," said the poet, "that's
all over now." Then, after a pause, he quoted two stanzas from a
pathetic ballad by Lady Grizel Bailie:--

"His bonnet stood then fu' fair on his brow,
His auld are looked better than mony ane's new;
But now he lets 't wear ony way it will hing,
And casts himself doure upon the corn bing.

"O were we young now as we ance hae been,
We should hae been galloping down on yon green,
And linking it owre the lily-white lea--
And werena my heart light I wad die."

The light heart of Burns failed him at last,--failed him because,
enfeebled by disease and incapacitated from performing his excise
duties, his salary, which had never exceeded seventy pounds a year, was
reduced to half that beggarly sum; because he was so distressed for
money that he was obliged to solicit a loan of a one-pound note from a
friend: failed him, poor heart, because it was broken! He took to his
bed for the last time on July 21st, 1796, and two days later, surrounded
by his little family, he passed away in the thirty-eighth year of his
age.

[Illustration: _BURNS._ Facsimile of the original of his version of the
Scottish song "Here's a Health to Them that's Awa."]

Such was the life of R