Glimpses of Three Coasts Part 11

A shining-beached crescent of country facing to the sunset, and rising higher and higher to the east till it becomes mountain, is the county of Ayrshire, fair and famous among the southern Scotch highlands. To a sixty-mile measure by air, between its north and south promontories, it stretches a curving coast of ninety; and when Robert Burns strolled over its breezy uplands, he saw always beautiful and mysterious silver lines of land thrusting themselves out into the mists of the sea, pointing to far-off island peaks, seeming sometimes to bridge and sometimes to wall vistas ending only in sky. These lines are as beautiful, elusive, and luring now as then, and in the inalienable loyalty of nature bear testimony to-day to their lover.

This is the greatest crown of the hero and the poet. Other great men hold fame by failing records which moth and fire destroy. The places that knew them know them no more when they are dead. Marble and canvas and parchment league in vain to keep green the memory of him who did not love and consecrate by his life-blood, in fight or in song, the soil where he trod. But for him who has done this,--who fought well, sang well,--the morning cloud, and the wild rose, and broken blades of gra.s.s under men's feet, become immortal witnesses; so imperishable, after all, are what we are in the habit of calling the "perishable things of this earth."

More than two hundred years ago, when the followers and holders of the different baronies of Ayrshire compared respective dignities and values, they made a proverb which ran:--

"Carrick for a man; Kyle for a coo; Cunningham for b.u.t.ter and cheese; Galloway for woo."

Before the nineteenth century set in, the proverb should have been changed; for Kyle is the land through which "Bonnie Doon" and Irvine Water run, and there has been never a man in all Carrick of whom Carrick can be proud as is Kyle of Robert Burns. It has been said that a copy of his poems lies on every Scotch cottager's shelf, by the side of the Bible. This is probably not very far from the truth. Certain it is, that in the villages where he dwelt there seems to be no man, no child, who does not apparently know every detail of the life he lived there, nearly a hundred years ago.

"Will ye be drivin' over to Tarbolton in the morning?" said the pretty young vice-landlady of the King's Arms at Ayr, when I wrote my name in her visitors' book late one Sat.u.r.day night.

"What made you think of that?" I asked, amused.

"And did ye not come on account o' Burns?" she replied. "There's been a many from your country here by reason of him this summer. I think you love him in America a'most as well as we do oursel's. It's vary seldom the English come to see anythin' aboot him. They've so many poets o' their own, I suppose, is the reason o' their not thinkin'

more o' Burns."

All that there was unflattering in this speech I forgave by reason of the girl's sweet low voice, pretty gray eyes, and gentle, refined hospitality. She might have been the daughter of some country gentleman, welcoming a guest to the house; and she took as much interest in making all the arrangements for my drive to Tarbolton the next morning as if it had been a pleasure excursion for herself. It is but a dull life she leads, helping her widowed mother keep the King's Arms,--dull, and unprofitable too, I fear; for it takes four men-servants and seven women to keep up the house, and I saw no symptom of any coming or going of customers in it. A stillness as of a church on weekdays reigned throughout the establishment. "At the races and when the yeomanry come," she said, there was something to do; but "in the winter nothing, except at the times of the county b.a.l.l.s. You know, ma'am, we've many county families here," she remarked with gentle pride, "and they all stop with us."

There is a compensation to the lower orders of a society where rank and castes are fixed, which does not readily occur at first sight to the democratic mind naturally rebelling against such defined distinctions. It is very much to be questioned whether, in a republic, the people who find themselves temporarily lower down in the social scale than they like to be or expect to stay, feel, in their consciousness of the possibility of rising, half so much pride or satisfying pleasure as do the lower cla.s.ses in England, for instance, in their relations with those whom they serve, whose dignity they seem to share by ministering to it.

The way from Ayr to Tarbolton must be greatly changed since the day when the sorrowful Burns family trod it, going from the Mount Oliphant farm to that of Lochlea. Now it is for miles a smooth road, on which horses' hoofs ring merrily, and neat little stone houses, with pretty yards, line it on both sides for some distance. The ground rises almost immediately, so that the dwellers in these little suburban houses get fine off-looks seaward and a wholesome breeze in at their windows. The houses are built joined by twos, with a yard in common.

They have three rooms besides the kitchen, and they rent for twenty-five pounds a year; so no industrious man of Ayr need be badly lodged. Where the houses leave off, hedges begin,--thorn and beech, untrimmed and luxuriant, with great outbursts of white honeysuckle and sweet-brier at intervals. As far as the eye could see were waving fields of wheat, oats, and "rye-gra.s.s," which last being just ripe was of a glorious red color. The wheat-fields were rich and full, sixty bushels to the acre. Oats, which do not take so kindly to the soil and air, produce sometimes only forty-eight.

Burns was but sixteen when his father moved from Mount Oliphant to the Lochlea farm, in the parish of Tarbolton. It was in Tarbolton that he first went to dancing-school, joined the Freemasons, and organized the club which, no doubt, cost him dear, "The Bachelors of Tarbolton." In the beginning this club consisted of only five members besides Burns and his brother; afterward it was enlarged to sixteen. Burns drew up the rules; and the last one--the tenth--is worth remembering, as an unconscious defining on his part of his ideal of human life:--

"Every man proper for a member of this society must have a friendly, honest, open heart, above everything dirty or mean, and must be a professed lover of one or more of the s.e.x. The proper person for this society is a cheerful, honest-hearted lad, who, if he has a friend that is true, and a mistress that is kind, and as much wealth as genteelly to make both ends meet, is just as happy as this world can make him."

Walking to-day through the narrow streets of Tarbolton, it is wellnigh impossible to conceive of such rollicking good cheer having made abiding-place there. It is a close, packed town, the houses of stone or white plaster,--many of them low, squalid, with thatched roofs and walls awry; those that are not squalid are grim. The streets are winding and tangled; the people look poor and dull. As I drove up to the "Crown Inn," the place where the Tarbolton Freemasons meet now, and where some of the relics of Burns's Freemason days are kept, the "first bells" were ringing in the belfry of the old church opposite, and the landlord of the inn replied with a look of great embarra.s.sment to my request to see the Burns relics,--

"It's the Sabbath, mem."

Then he stood still, scratching his head for a few moments, and then set off, at full run, down the street without another word.

"He's gone to the head Mason," explained the landlady. "It takes three to open the chest. I think ye'll na see it the day." And she turned on her heel with a frown and left me.

"They make much account o' the Sabbath in this country," said my driver. "Another day ye'd do better."

Thinking of Burns's lines to the "Unco Guid," I strolled over into the churchyard opposite, to await the landlord's return. The bell-ringer had come down, and followed me curiously about among the graves. One very old stone had carved upon it two high-top boots; under these, two low shoes; below these, two kneeling figures, a man and a woman, cut in high relief; no inscription of any sort.

"What can it mean?" I asked.

The bell-ringer could not tell; it was so old n.o.body knew anything about it. His mother, now ninety years of age, remembered seeing it when she was a child, and it looked just as old then as now.

"There's a many strange things in this graveyard," said he; and then he led me to a corner where, enclosed by swinging chains and stone posts, was a carefully kept square of green turf, on which lay a granite slab. "Every year comes the money to pay for keeping that gra.s.s green," he said, "and no name to it. It's been going on that way for fifty years."

The stone-wall around the graveyard was dilapidated, and in parts was falling down.

"I suppose this old wall was here in Burns's time," I said.

"Ay, yes," said the bell-ringer; and pointing to a low, thatched cottage just outside it, "and yon shop--many's the time he's been in it playin' his tricks."

The landlord of the inn now came running up, with profuse apologies for the ill success of his mission. He had been to the head Mason, hoping he would come over and a.s.sist in the opening of the chest, in which were kept a Mason's ap.r.o.n worn by Burns, some jewels of his, and a book of minutes kept by him. But "bein' 's it's the Sabbath," and "he's sick in bed," and it was "against the rules to open the regalia chest unless three Masons were present," the kindly landlord, piling up reason after reason, irrespective of their consistency with each other, went on to explain that it would be impossible; but I might see the chair in which Burns always sat. This was a huge oaken chair, black with age, and furrowed with names cut deep in the wood. It was shaped and proportioned like a child's high-chair, and had precisely such a rest for the feet as is put on children's high-chairs. To this day the Grand Mason sits in it at their meetings, and will so long as the St. James Lodge exists.

"They've been offered hundreds of pounds for that chair, mem, plain as it is. You'd not think it; but there's no money'd buy it from the lodge," said the landlord.

The old club-house where the jolly "Bachelors of Tarbolton" met in Burns's day is a low, two-roomed, thatched cottage, half in ruins. The room where the bachelors smoked, drank, and sang is now little more than a cellar filled with rubbish and filth,--nothing left but the old fireplace to show that it was ever inhabited. In the other half of the cottage lives a laborer's family,--father, mother, and a young child: their one room, with its bed built into the wall, and their few delf dishes on the dresser, is probably much like the room in which Burns first opened his wondrous eyes. The man was lying on the floor playing with his baby. At the name of Burns, he sprang up with a hearty "Ay, weel," and ran out in his blue-stocking feet to show me the cellar, of which, it was plainly to be seen, he was far prouder than of his more comfortable side of the house. The name by which the inn was called in Burns's day he did not know. But "He's a Mason over there; he'll know," he cried; and before I could prevent him, he had darted, still shoeless, across the road, and asked the question of a yet poorer laborer, who was taking his Sunday on his door-sill with two bairns between his knees. He had heard, but had "forgotten." "Feyther'll know," said the wife, coming forward with the third bairn, a baby, in her arms. "I'll rin an' ask feyther." The old man tottered out, and gazed with a vacant, feeble look at me, while he replied impatiently to his daughter: "Manson's Inn, 't was called; ye've heard it times eneuch."

"I dare say you always drink Burns's health at the lodge when you meet," I said to the laborer.

"Ay, ay, his health's ay dronkit," he said, with a coa.r.s.e laugh, "weel dronkit."

A few rods to the east, and down the very road Burns was wont to come and go between Lochlea and Tarbolton, still stands "Willie's mill,"--cottage and mill and shed and barn, all in one low, long, oddly joined (or jointed) building of irregular heights, like a telescope pulled out to its full length; a little brook and a bit of gay garden in front. In the winter the mill goes by water from a lake near by; in the summer by steam,--a great change since the night when Burns went

"Todlin' down on Willie's mill,"

and though he thought he

"Was na fou, but just had plenty,"

could not for the life of him make out to count the moon's horns.

"To count her horns, wi' a' my power, I set mysel'; But whether she had three or four I could na tell."

To go by road from Tarbolton to Lochlea farm is to go around three sides of a square, east, north, and then west again. Certain it is that Burns never took so many superfluous steps to do it; and as I drove along I found absorbing interest in looking at the little cl.u.s.ter of farm buildings beyond the fields, and wondering where the light-footed boy used to "cut across" for his nightly frolics. There is nothing left at Lochlea now of him or his; nothing save a worn lintel of the old barn. The buildings are all new; and there is a look of thrift and comfort about the place, quite unlike the face it must have worn in 1784. The house stands on a rising knoll, and from the windows looking westward and seaward there must be a fine horizon and headlands to be seen at sunset. n.o.body was at home on this day except a barefooted servant-girl, who was keeping the house while the family were at church. She came to the door with an expression of almost alarm, at the unwonted apparition of a carriage driving down the lane on Sunday, and a stranger coming in the name of a man dead so long ago. She evidently knew nothing of Burns except that, for some reason connected with him, the old lintel was kept and shown. She was impatient of the interruption of her Sabbath, and all the while she was speaking kept her finger in her book--"Footprints of Jesus"--at the place where she had been reading, and glanced at it continually, as if it were an amulet which could keep her from harm through the worldly interlude into which she had been forced.

"It's a pity ye came on the Sabba-day," remarked the driver again, as we drove away from Lochlea. "The country people 'ull not speak on the Sabbath." It would have been useless to try to explain to him that the spectacle of this Scottish "Sabba-day" was of itself of almost as much interest as the sight of the fields in which Robert Burns had walked and worked.

The farm of Mossgiel, which was Burns's next home after Lochlea, is about three miles from Tarbolton, and only one from Mauchline. Burns and his brother Gilbert had become tenants of it a few months before their father's death in 1784. It was stocked by the joint savings of the whole family; and each member of the family was allowed fair rates of wages for all labor performed on it. The allowance to Gilbert and to Robert was seven pounds a year each, and it is said that during the four years that Robert lived there, his expenses never exceeded this pittance.

To Mossgiel he came with new resolutions. He had already reaped some bitter harvests from the wild oats sown during the seven years at Lochlea. He was no longer a boy. He says of himself at this time,--

"I entered on Mossgiel with a full resolution, 'Come, go; I will be wise.'"

Driving up the long, straight road which leads from the highway to the hawthorn fortress in which the Mossgiel farm buildings stand, one recalls these words, and fancies the brave young fellow striding up the field, full of new hope and determination. The hawthorn hedge to-day is much higher than a man's head, and completely screens from the road the farm-house and the outbuildings behind it. The present tenants have lived on the farm forty years, the first twenty in the same house which stood there when Robert and Gilbert Burns pledged themselves to pay one hundred and twenty pounds a year for the farm.

When the house was rebuilt, twenty years ago, the old walls were used in part, and the windows were left in the same places; but, instead of the low, sloping-roofed, garret-like rooms upstairs, where Burns used to sleep and write, are now comfortable chambers of modern fashion.

"Were you not sorry to have the old house pulled down?" I said to the comely, aged farm-wife.

"'Deed, then, I was very prood," she replied; "it had na 'coomodation, and the thatch took in the rain an' all that was vile."

In the best room of the house hung two autograph letters of Burns's plainly framed: one, his letter to the la.s.s of ----, asking her permission to print the poem he had addressed to her; the other, the original copy of the poem. These were "presented to the house by the brother of the lady," the woman said, and they had "a great value now." But when she first came to this part of the country she was "vary soorpreezed" to find the great esteem in which Burns's poetry was held. In the North, where she had lived, he was "na thocht weel of." Her father had never permitted a copy of his poems to be brought inside his doors, and had forbidden his children to read a word of them. "He thocht them too rough for us to read." It was not until she was a woman grown, and living in her husband's house, that she had ever ventured to disobey this parental command, and she did not now herself think they were "fitted for the reading of young pairsons."

"There was much more discreet writin's," she said severely; an opinion which there was no gainsaying.

There is a broader horizon to be seen, looking westward from the fields of Mossgiel, than from those of Lochlea; the lands are higher and n.o.bler of contour. Superb trees, which must have been superb a century ago, stand to right and left of the house,--beeches, ashes, oaks, and planes. The fields which are in sight from the house are now all gra.s.s-grown. I have heard that twenty years ago, it was confidently told in which field Burns, ploughing late in the autumn, broke into the little nest of the

"Wee sleekit, cow'rin', tim'rous beastie,"

whom every song-lover has known and pitied from that day to this, and whose misfortunes have answered ever since for a mint of rea.s.suring comparison to all of us, remembering that "the best-laid schemes o'