The next forenoon my companion put me to shame by attending church, after vainly exhorting me to do the like; and, it being Sacrament Sunday, and my poor friend being wedged into the farther end of a closely filled pew, he was forced to stay through the preaching of four several sermons, and came back perfectly exhausted and desperate.  He was somewhat consoled, however, on finding that he had witnessed a spectacle of Scotch manners identical with that of Burns’s “Holy Fair,” on the very spot where the poet located that immortal description.  By way of further conformance to the customs of the country, we ordered a sheep’s head and the broth, and did penance accordingly; and at five o’clock we took a fly, and set out for Burns’s farm of Moss Giel.

Moss Giel is not more than a mile from Mauchline, and the road extends over a high ridge of land, with a view of far hills and green slopes on either side.  Just before we reached the farm, the driver stopped to point out a hawthorn, growing by the way-side, which he said was Burns’s “Lousie Thorn”; and I devoutly plucked a branch, although I have really forgotten where or how this illustrious shrub has been celebrated.  We then turned into a rude gateway, and almost immediately came to the farm-house of Moss Giel, standing some fifty yards removed from the high-road, behind a tall hedge of hawthorn, and considerably overshadowed by trees.  The house is a whitewashed stone cottage, like thousands of others in England and Scotland, with a thatched roof, on which grass and weeds have intruded a picturesque, though alien growth.  There is a door and one window in front, besides another little window that peeps out among the thatch.  Close by the cottage, and extending back at right angles from it, so as to inclose the farm-yard, are two other buildings of the same size, shape, and general appearance as the house:  any one of the three looks just as fit for a human habitation as the two others, and all three look still more suitable for donkey-stables and pig-sties.  As we drove into the farm-yard, bounded on three sides by these three hovels, a large dog began to bark at us; and some women and children made their appearance, but seemed to demur about admitting us, because the master and mistress were very religious people, and had not yet come back from the Sacrament at Mauchline.

However, it would not do to be turned back from the very threshold of Robert Burns; and as the women seemed to be merely straggling visitors, and nobody, at all events, had a right to send us away, we went into the back-door, and, turning to the right, entered a kitchen.  It showed a deplorable lack of housewifely neatness, and in it there were three or four children, one of whom, a girl eight or nine years old, held a baby in her arms.  She proved to be the daughter of the people of the house, and gave us what leave she could to look about us.  Thence we stepped across the narrow mid-passage of the cottage into