se. "I have chosen this," he wrote, "after mature
deliberation. It is immediate bread, and, though poor in comparison of
the last eighteen months of my existence, 'tis luxury in comparison of
all my preceding life." However, when he settled finally with Creech
about his poems, he found himself with between L500 and L600; and he
retained his excise commission as a _dernier ressort_, to be used only
if a reverse of fortune rendered it necessary.

He decided now to exchange Mossgiel for Ellisland farm, about six miles
from Dumfries. As soon as he was able to leave Edinburgh, he had hurried
to Mossgiel and gone through a justice-of-peace marriage with Jean
Armour. Burns, with all his faults, was an honest and a high-spirited
man, and he loved the mother of his children. Had he hesitated to make
her his wife, he must have sunk into the callousness of a ruffian, or
that misery of miseries, the remorse of a poet.

Some months later he writes that his marriage "was not, perhaps, in
consequence of the attachment of romance, but I have no cause to repent
it. If I have not got polite tattle, modish manners, and fashionable
dress, I am not sickened and disgusted with the multiform curse of
boarding-school affectation; and I have got the handsomest figure, the
sweetest temper, the soundest constitution, and the kindest heart in the
country." It was during the honeymoon, as he calls it, that he wrote the
beautiful "O a' the airts the wind can blaw." He used to say that the
happiest period of his life was the first winter at Ellisland, with wife
and children around him. It was then that he wrote, among other songs,
"John Anderson, my Jo," "Tarn Glen," "My heart's in the Highlands," "Go
fetch to me a pint of wine," and "Willie brewed a peck o' maut."

But the "golden days" of Ellisland were short. Burns's farming
speculations once more failed, and he had to take up his excise
commission. "I am now," says he, "a poor rascally gauger, condemned to
gallop two hundred miles every week to inspect dirty ponds and yeasty
barrels." Both in prose and verse he has recorded the feelings with
which he first followed his new vocation, and his jests on the subject
are uniformly bitter. It was a vocation which exposed him to temptations
of the kind he was least likely to resist. His extraordinary
conversational powers led him into peril wherever he went. If he entered
an inn at midnight, after all the inmates were in bed, the news of his
arrival ci