you a poem on the
scene, and I'll put in the verses with an engraving of the ruin."
Burns having found a fitting day and hour, when "his barmy noddle was
working prime," walked out to his favourite path down the western bank
of the river.

The poem was the work of one day, of which Mrs. Burns retained a vivid
recollection. Her husband had spent most of the day by the river side,
and in the afternoon she joined him with her two children. He was
busily engaged _crooning to himsel_; and Mrs. Burns, perceiving that
her presence was an interruption, loitered behind with her little ones
among the broom. Her attention was presently attracted by the strange
and wild gesticulations of the bard, who was now seen at some
distance, agonized with an ungovernable access of joy. He was reciting
very loud, and with tears rolling down his cheeks, those animated
verses which he had just conceived,--

Now Tam! O Tam! had thae been queans,
A' plump and strappin' in their teens.'

"I wish ye had seen him," said his wife; "he was in such ecstasy that
the tears were happing down his cheeks." These last words are given by
Allan Cunningham, in addition to the above account, which Lockhart got
from a manuscript journal of Cromek. The poet having committed the
verses to writing on the top of his sod-dyke above the water, (p. 122)
came into the house, and read them immediately in high triumph at the
fireside.

Thus in the case of two of Burns's best poems, we have an account of
the bard as he appeared in his hour of inspiration, not to any
literary friend bent on pictorial effect, but from the plain narrative
of his simple and admiring wife. Burns speaks of _Tam o' Shanter_ as
his first attempt at a tale in verse--unfortunately it was also his
last. He himself regarded it as his master-piece of all his poems, and
posterity has not, I believe, reversed the judgment.

In this, one of his happiest flights, Burns's imagination bore him
from the vale of Nith back to the banks of Doon, and to the weird
tales he had there heard in childhood, told by the winter firesides.
The characters of the poem have been identified; that of Tam is taken
from a farmer, Douglas Graham, who lived at the farm of Shanter, in
the parish of Kirkoswald. He had a scolding wife, called Helen
McTaggart, and the tombstones of both are pointed out in Kirkoswald
kirkyard. Souter Johnnie is more uncertain, but is supposed, with some
probability, t