needed fifty other things. He had no other meat or drink
in the house but oat bread and cheese--the cheese was made with the
addition of seeds--and some skimmed milk. He gave us of his bread and
cheese, and milk, which proved to be sour.

We had yet ten or eleven miles to travel, and no food with us. William
lay under the wind in a corn-field below the house, being not well enough
to partake of the milk and bread. Coleridge gave our host a pamphlet,
'The Crisis of the Sugar Colonies;' he was well acquainted with Burns's
poems. There was a politeness and a manly freedom in this man's manners
which pleased me very much. He told us that he had served a gentleman, a
captain in the army--he did not know who he was, for none of his
relations had ever come to see him, but he used to receive many
letters--that he had lived near Dumfries till they would let him stay no
longer, he made such havoc with the game; his whole delight from morning
till night, and the long year through, was in field sports; he would be
on his feet the worst days in winter, and wade through snow up to the
middle after his game. If he had company he was in tortures till they
were gone; he would then throw off his coat and put on an old jacket not
worth half-a-crown. He drank his bottle of wine every day, and two if he
had better sport than usual. Ladies sometimes came to stay with his
wife, and he often carried them out in an Irish jaunting-car, and if they
vexed him he would choose the dirtiest roads possible, and spoil their
clothes by jumping in and out of the car, and treading upon them. 'But
for all that'--and so he ended all--'he was a good fellow, and a clever
fellow, and he liked him well.' He would have ten or a dozen hares in
the larder at once, he half maintained his family with game, and he
himself was very fond of eating of the spoil--unusual with true
heart-and-soul sportsmen.

The man gave us an account of his farm where he had lived, which was so
cheap and pleasant that we thought we should have liked to have had it
ourselves. Soon after leaving the turnpike house we turned up a hill to
the right, the road for a little way very steep, bare hills, with sheep.

After ascending a little while we heard the murmur of a stream far below
us, and saw it flowing downwards on our left, towards the Nith, and
before us, between steep green hills, coming along a winding valley. The
simplicity of the prospect impressed us very much. There