once into the author's purse; and he was encouraged upon all
hands to go to Edinburgh and push his success in a second and
larger edition. Third and last in these series of
interpositions, a letter came one day to Mossgiel Farm for
Robert. He went to the window to read it; a sudden change
came over his face, and he left the room without a word.
Years afterwards, when the story began to leak out, his
family understood that he had then learned the death of
Highland Mary. Except in a few poems and a few dry
indications purposely misleading as to date, Burns himself
made no reference to this passage of his life; it was an
adventure of which, for I think sufficient reasons, he
desired to bury the details. Of one thing we may be glad: in
after years he visited the poor girl's mother, and left her
with the impression that he was "a real warm-hearted chield."

Perhaps a month after he received this intelligence, he set
out for Edinburgh on a pony he had borrowed from a friend.
The town that winter was "agog with the ploughman poet."
Robertson, Dugald Stewart, Blair, "Duchess Gordon and all the
gay world," were of his acquaintance. Such a revolution is
not to be found in literary history. He was now, it must be
remembered, twenty-seven years of age; he had fought since
his early boyhood an obstinate battle against poor soil, bad
seed, and inclement seasons, wading deep in Ayrshire mosses,
guiding the plough in the furrow wielding "the thresher's
weary flingin'-tree;" and his education, his diet, and his
pleasures, had been those of a Scotch countryman. Now he
stepped forth suddenly among the polite and learned. We can
see him as he then was, in his boots and buckskins, his blue