door and it was almost morning, when I took his hand for the last time, and under the shadow of the Scottish hills bade him farewell, as he glided off into the darkness toward Lasswade. I watched his slight figure, vanishing, reappearing, vanishing, until it was lost in the mist-faded forever from my vision.

"In after years when I stood by his grave in the Edinburgh churchyard and thought of his strange, struggling life, I recalled his own words about a battlefield that nature had long since healed and reconciled to herself under the tender oblivion of flowers."

There is one old brown book upon the Edinburgh shelf connected with Robert Burns. Who can think of Edinburgh without a vision of his beautiful unhappy face rising up before us, "a miserable and mighty poet of the human heart"? It is a copy of the first Edinburgh edition of his poems, the same for which the members of the Caledonian Hunt subscribed, taking one hundred copies, and which Burns said it gave him "so much real happiness to see in print." This copy was said to have been a gift from Burns to some woman, but I

find no proof of this. It is interesting enough, however, with its list of grand names, and when we recall all the circumstances of its publication. A small edition of his poems had been printed the year previous at Kilmarnock, and the rapidity with which it sold was a good promise for his poetic future. There was a "reprint and fac-simile" of this edition brought out in 1867, of which, also, only six hundred copies were made, and one of these reprints fortunately is now here before me. There is here a manuscript letter, too, from Burns, addressed to Captain Hamilton, of Dumfries. It is a sorrowful letter enough, full of money troubles, and confirms what we already know of his misfortunes.

Burns in Edinburgh, with his new leathercovered book, now looking so old and according to modern ideas so unattractive, was at the summit of his life's happiness. Mr. Fields often told how Burns was seen at that time by Mrs. Basil Montague, who later, in her old age, loved to describe him. She was herself just entering society as a young girl, she used to say, when Burns was enjoying the first-fruits

of his fame. "I have seen many a handsome man in my time," she would say; "but none

I

of them equalled young Robbie Burns. never saw such a pair of eyes as flashed from under his noble forehead."

Burns had by no means grown up ignorant of books. In his father's cottage there were many volumes famous in those days, which were well read by the young son, but of poetry, except Fergusson's and Allan Ramsay's, there was nothing, save a collection of ballads and songs owned by a strange old woman who lived with them. He did not forget his love for the two poets who had helped to nurse his young genius, and the first places he is known to have visited in Edinburgh were the lowly grave of Fergusson and the house of Allan Ramsay.

Among Mr. Fields's papers I find a page where he speaks of meeting one of the sons of Burns in London in 1859. "I asked him what made on him (as a boy) the deepest impression of his father's personality? He said, 'The sympathetic tone of his voice whenever he spoke to any poor person, any one poorer and more suffering than himself.'" It was from the hand of this son that we received the daguerreotype of Burns taken from a portrait still, I believe, in possession of the family.

Lockhart's description of Burns at this period

in Edinburgh, as given to him by Sir Walter Scott, Mr. Fields used to say was the one he