for that," answered the servant maid. "That's no true,"
exclaimed the child; "the muckle black kist is fou' o' the bottles o'
yill that my mither sat up a' nicht brewing for the fair."... "We are
in a hurry just now," said Burns, "but when we return from the fair,
we'll examine the muckle black kist." In acts like these, and in many
another anecdote that might be given, is seen the genuine
human-heartedness of the man, in strange contrast with the
bitternesses which so often find vent in his letters. Ultimately, as
we shall see, the exciseman's work told heavily against his farming,
his poetry, and his habits of life. But it was some time before this
became apparent. The solitary rides through the moors and dales that
border Nithsdale gave him opportunities, if not for composing long
poems, at any rate for crooning over those short songs in which mainly
his genius now found vent. "The visits of the muses to me," he writes,
"and I believe to most of their acquaintance, like the visits of good
angels, are short and far between; but I meet them now and then as I
jog through the hills of Nithsdale, just as I used to do on the banks
of Ayr."

Take as a sample some of the varying moods he passed through in the
summer and autumn of 1789. In the May-time of that year an incident
occurs, which the poet thus describes:--"One morning lately, as I was
out pretty early in the fields, sowing some grass-seeds, I heard the
burst of a shot from a neighbouring plantation, and presently a poor
little wounded hare came hirpling by me. You will guess my indignation
at the inhuman fellow who could shoot a hare at this season, when all
of them have young ones. Indeed there is something in the business of
destroying, for our sport, individuals in the animal creation that (p. 107)
do not injure us materially, which I could never reconcile to my ideas
of virtue." The lad who fired the shot and roused the poet's
indignation, was the son of a neighbouring farmer. Burns cursed him,
and being near the Nith at the time, threatened to throw him into the
river. He found, however, a more innocent vent for his feelings in the
following lines:--

Inhuman man! curse on thy barbarous art,
And blasted be thy murder-aiming eye!
May never pity soothe thee with a sigh,
Nor ever pleasure glad thy cruel heart!

Go live, poor wanderer of the wood and field,
The bitter little that of