e, O_. This song, and the one entitled _Mary Morison_ render
the whole scenery and sentiment of those rural meetings in a manner at
once graphic and free from coarseness. Yet, truth to speak, it must be
said that those gloaming trysts, however they may touch the imagination
and lend themselves to song, do in reality lie at the root of much
that degrades the life and habits of the Scottish peasantry.

But those first three or four years at Lochlea, if not free from
peril, were still with the poet times of innocence. His brother
Gilbert, in the words of Chambers, "used to speak of his brother as at
this period, to himself, a more admirable being than at any other. He
recalled with delight the days when they had to go with one or two
companions to cut peats for the winter fuel, because Robert was sure
to enliven their toil with a rattling fire of witty remarks on men and
things, mingled with the expressions of a genial glowing heart, and
the whole perfectly free from the taint which he afterwards acquired
from his contact with the world. Not even in those volumes which
afterwards charmed his country from end to end, did Gilbert see his
brother in so interesting a light as in these conversations in the
bog, with only two or three noteless peasants for an audience."

While Gilbert acknowledges that his brother's love-makings were at (p. 012)
this time unceasing, he asserts that they were "governed by the
strictest rules of virtue and modesty, from which he never deviated
till he reached his twenty-third year." It was towards the close of
his twenty-second that there occurs the record of his first serious
desire to marry and settle in life. He had set his affections on a
young woman named Ellison Begbie, daughter of a small farmer, and at
that time servant in a family on Cessnock Water, about two miles from
Lochlea. She is said to have been not a beauty, but of unusual
liveliness and grace of mind. Long afterwards, when he had seen much
of the world, Burns spoke of this young woman as, of all those on whom
he ever fixed his fickle affections, the one most likely to have made
a pleasant partner for life. Four letters which he wrote to her are
preserved, in which he expresses the most pure and honourable feelings
in language which, if a little formal, is, for manliness and
simplicity, a striking contrast to the bombast of some of his later
epistles. Songs, too, he addressed to her--_The Lass of Cessnock
Banks_, _Bonnie Peggy A