St. Michael’s Church is of red freestone, and was built about a hundred years ago, on an old Catholic foundation.  Our guide admitted us into it, and showed us, in the porch, a very pretty little marble figure of a child asleep, with a drapery over the lower part, from beneath which appeared its two baby feet.  It was truly a sweet little statue; and the woman told us that it represented a child of the sculptor, and that the baby (here still in its marble infancy) had died more than twenty-six years ago.  “Many ladies,” she said, “especially such as had ever lost a child, had shed tears over it.”  It was very pleasant to think of the sculptor bestowing the best of his genius and art to re-create his tender child in stone, and to make the representation as soft and sweet as the original; but the conclusion of the story has something that jars with our awakened sensibilities.  A gentleman from London had seen the statue, and was so much delighted with it that he bought it of the father-artist, after it had lain above a quarter of a century in the church-porch.  So this was not the real, tender image that came out of the father’s heart; he had sold that truest one for a hundred guineas, and sculptured this mere copy to replace it.  The first figure was entirely naked in its earthly and spiritual innocence.  The copy, as I have said above, has a drapery over the lower limbs.  But, after all, if we come to the truth of the matter, the sleeping baby may be as fitly reposited in the drawing-room of a connoisseur as in a cold and dreary church-porch.

We went into the church, and found it very plain and naked, without altar-decorations, and having its floor quite covered with unsightly wooden pews.  The woman led us to a pew cornering on one of the side-aisles, and, telling us that it used to be Burns’s family-pew, showed us his seat, which is in the corner by the aisle.  It is so situated, that a sturdy pillar hid him from the pulpit, and from the minister’s eye; “for Robin was no great friends with the ministers,” said she.  This touch—­his seat behind the pillar, and Burns himself nodding in sermon-time, or keenly observant of profane things—­brought him before us to the life.  In the corner seat of the next pew, right before Burns, and not more than two feet off, sat the young lady on whom the poet saw that unmentionable parasite which he has immortalized in song.  We were ungenerous enough to ask the lady’s name, but the good woman could not tell it.  This was the last thing which we saw in Dumfries worthy of record; and it ought to be noted that our guide refused some money which my companion offered her, because I had already paid her what she deemed sufficient.