es farther up the way. I heard one of a group inquire,
with much simplicity, 'Who do you think will be our poet now?'"

During the three or four days between his return from Brow and the
end, his mind, when not roused by conversation, wandered in delirium.
Yet when friends drew near his bed, sallies of his old wit would for a
moment return. To a brother volunteer who came to see him he said,
with a smile, "John, don't let the awkward squad fire over me." His
wife was unable to attend him; and four helpless children wandered
from room to room gazing on their unhappy parents. All the while,
Jessie Lewars was ministering to the helpless and to the dying one,
and doing what kindness could do to relieve their suffering. On the
fourth day after his return, the 21st of July, Burns sank into his
last sleep. His children stood around his bed, and his eldest son
remembered long afterwards all the circumstances of that sad hour.

The news that Burns was dead, sounded through all Scotland like a
knell announcing a great national bereavement. Men woke up to feel the
greatness of the gift which in him had been vouchsafed to their
generation, and which had met, on the whole, with so poor a
reception. Self-reproach mingled with the universal sorrow, as (p. 186)
men asked themselves whether they might not have done more to cherish
and prolong that rarely gifted life.

Of course there was a great public funeral, in which the men of
Dumfries and the neighbourhood, high and low, appeared as mourners,
and soldiers and volunteers with colours, muffled drums, and arms
reversed, not very appropriately mingled in the procession. At the
very time when they were laying her husband in his grave, Mrs. Burns
gave birth to his posthumous son. He was called Maxwell, after the
physician who attended his father, but he died in infancy. The spot
where the poet was laid was in a comer of St. Michael's churchyard,
and the grave remained for a time unmarked by any monument. After some
years his wife placed over it a plain, unpretending stone, inscribed
with his name and age, and with the names of his two boys, who were
buried in the same place. Well had it been, if he had been allowed to
rest undisturbed in this grave where his family had laid him. But
well-meaning, though ignorant, officiousness would not suffer it to be
so. Nearly twenty years after the poet's death, a huge, cumbrous,
unsightly mausoleum was, by public subscription, erected at a lit