own in the parlour. The walls were coloured with a
blue wash; on one side of the fire was a mahogany desk, opposite to the
window a clock, and over the desk a print from the 'Cotter's Saturday
Night,' which Burns mentions in one of his letters having received as a
present. The house was cleanly and neat in the inside, the stairs of
stone, scoured white, the kitchen on the right side of the passage, the
parlour on the left. In the room above the parlour the Poet died, and
his son after him in the same room. The servant told us she had lived
five years with Mrs. Burns, who was now in great sorrow for the death of
'Wallace.' She said that Mrs. Burns's youngest son was at Christ's
Hospital.

We were glad to leave Dumfries, which is no agreeable place to them who
do not love the bustle of a town that seems to be rising up to wealth.
We could think of little else but poor Burns, and his moving about on
that unpoetic ground. In our road to Brownhill, the next stage, we
passed Ellisland at a little distance on our right, his farmhouse. We
might there have had more pleasure in looking round, if we had been
nearer to the spot; but there is no thought surviving in connexion with
Burns's daily life that is not heart-depressing. Travelled through the
vale of Nith, here little like a vale, it is so broad, with irregular
hills rising up on each side, in outline resembling the old-fashioned
valances of a bed. There is a great deal of arable land; the corn ripe;
trees here and there--plantations, clumps, coppices, and a newness in
everything. So much of the gorse and broom rooted out that you wonder
why it is not all gone, and yet there seems to be almost as much gorse
and broom as corn; and they grow one among another you know not how.
Crossed the Nith; the vale becomes narrow, and very pleasant; cornfields,
green hills, clay cottages; the river's bed rocky, with woody banks.
Left the Nith about a mile and a half, and reached Brownhill, a lonely
inn, where we slept. The view from the windows was pleasing, though some
travellers might have been disposed to quarrel with it for its general
nakedness; yet there was abundance of corn. It is an open country--open,
yet all over hills. At a little distance were many cottages among trees,
that looked very pretty. Brownhill is about seven or eight miles from
Ellisland. I fancied to myself, while I was sitting in the parlour, that
Burns might have caroused there, for most likely his