it their common friend Nicol, who
was spending his vacation in Moffatdale. They met and spent a night in
Nicol's lodging. It was a small thatched cottage, near Craigieburn--a
place celebrated by Burns in one of his songs--and stands on the
right-hand side as the traveller passes up Moffatdale to Yarrow,
between the road and the river. Few pass that way now without having
the cottage pointed out, as the place where the three merry comrades
met that night.

"We had such a joyous meeting," Burns writes, "that Mr. Masterton and
I agreed, each in our own way, that we should celebrate the business,"
and Burns's celebration of it was the famous bacchanalian song,--

O, Willie brewed a peck o' maut,
And Bob and Allan cam to pree.

If bacchanalian songs are to be written at all, this certainly must be
pronounced "The king amang them a'." But while no one can withhold
admiration from the genius and inimitable humour of the song, still we
read it with very mingled feelings, when we think that perhaps it may
have helped some topers since Burns's day a little faster on the road
to ruin. As for the three boon-companions themselves, just ten years
after that night, Currie wrote, "These three honest fellows--all men
of uncommon talents--are now all under the turf." And in 1821, John
Struthers, a Scottish poet little known, but of great worth and some
genius, thus recurs to Currie's words:--
(p. 111)
Nae mair in learning Willie toils, nor Allan wakes the melting lay,
Nor Rab, wi' fancy-witching wiles, beguiles the hour o' dawning day;
For tho' they were na very fou, that wicked wee drap in the e'e
Has done its turn; untimely now the green grass waves o'er a' the three.

_Willie brewed a Peck o' Maut_ was soon followed by another
bacchanalian effusion, the ballad called _The Whistle_. Three lairds,
all neighbours of Burns at Ellisland, met at Friars Carse on the 16th
of October, 1789, to contend with each other in a drinking-bout. The
prize was an ancient ebony whistle, said to have been brought to
Scotland in the reign of James the Sixth by a Dane, who, after three
days and three nights' contest in hard drinking, was overcome by Sir
Robert Laurie, of Maxwelton, with whom the whistle remained as a
trophy. It passed into the Riddell family, and now in Burns's time it
was to be again contested for in the same rude orgie. Burns was
appoin