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.
At the railway-station we spent more than a weary hour, waiting for
the train, which at last came up, and took us to Mauchline. We got
into an omnibus, the only conveyance to be had, and drove about a mile
to the village, where we established ourselves at the Loudoun Hotel,
one of the veriest country-inns which we have found in Great Britain.
The town of Mauchline, a place more redolent of Burns than almost any
other, consists of a street or two of contiguous cottages, mostly
white-washed, and with thatched roofs. It has nothing sylvan or rural
in the immediate village, and is as ugly a place as mortal man could
contrive to make, or to render uglier through a succession of untidy
generations. The fashion of paving the village-street, and patching
one shabby house on the gable-end of another, quite shuts out all
verdure and pleasantness; but, I presume, we are not likely to see a
more genuine old Scotch village, such as they used to be in Burns's
time, and long before, than this of Mauchline.
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