rushed the hags after the farmer, who made at the gallop for
the bridge of Doon, knowing that they could not cross a stream: he
escaped; but Maggie, who was foremost, seized his horse's tail at the
middle of the bridge, and pulled it off in her efforts to stay him.

This poem was the work of a single day: Burns walked out to his
favourite musing path, which runs towards the old tower of the Isle,
along Nithside, and was observed to walk hastily and mutter as he
went. His wife knew by these signs that he was engaged in composition,
and watched him from the window; at last wearying, and moreover
wondering at the unusual length of his meditations, she took her
children with her and went to meet him; but as he seemed not to see
her, she stept aside among the broom to allow him to pass, which he
did with a flushed brow and dropping eyes, reciting these lines
aloud:--

"Now Tam! O, Tum! had thae been queans,
A' plump and strapping in their teens,
Their sacks, instead o' creeshie flannen,
Been snaw-white seventeen hunder linen!
Thir breeks o' mine, my only pair,
That ance were plush, o' gude blue hair,
I wad hae gien them off my hurdies,
For ae blink o' the bonnie burdies!"

He embellished this wild tradition from fact as well as from fancy:
along the road which Tam came on that eventful night his memory
supplied circumstances which prepared him for the strange sight at the
kirk of Alloway. A poor chapman had perished, some winters before, in
the snow; a murdered child had been found by some early hunters; a
tippling farmer had fallen from his horse at the expense of his neck,
beside a "meikle stane"; and a melancholy old woman had hanged herself
at the bush aboon the well, as the poem relates: all these matters the
poet pressed into the service of the muse, and used them with a skill
which adorns rather than oppresses the legend. A pert lawyer from
Dumfries objected to the language as obscure: "Obscure, sir!" said
Burns; "you know not the language of that great master of your own
art--the devil. If you had a witch for your client you would not be
able to manage her defence!"

He wrote few poems after his marriage, but he composed many songs: the
sweet voice of Mrs. Burns and the craving of Johnson's Museum will in
some measure account for the number, but not for their variety, which
is truly wonderful. In the history of that mournful strain, "Mary in
Heaven," we read the story of many of