abstraction as he lay pillowed by the sheaves of his stackyard, gazing entranced at the "lingering star" above him till the immortal song was born. Poor Mary is laid in the burial-plot of her uncle in the west kirkyard of Greenock, near Crawford Street; our pilgrimage in Burns-land may fitly end at her grave. A pathway, beaten by feet of many reverend visitors, leads us to the spot. It is so pathetically different from the scenes she loved in life the heather-clad slopes of her Highland home, the seclusion of the wooded braes where she loitered with her poet-lover. Scant foliage is about her; few birds may sing above her here. She lies by the wall, narrow streets hem in the enclosure, the air is sullied by smoke from factories and from steamers passing within a stone's-throw on the busy Clyde, the clanging of many hammers and the discordant din of machinery and traffic invade the place and sound in our ears as we muse above the ashes of the gentle lassie. For half a century her grave was unmarked and neglected, then, by subscription, a monument of marble, twelve feet in height, and of graceful proportions, was raised. It bears a sculptural medallion representing Burns and Mary, with clasped hands, plighting their troth. Beneath is the simple inscription, read oft by eyes dim with tears. Erected Over the Grave of Highland Mary "My Mary, dear departed shade, WILL YOU GO TO THE INDIES, MY MARY? (READ by the author, Mr. Wallace Bruce, at the unveiling of the Fourth Panel of the Ayr Burns Statue on the 21st of August, 1895.) "WILL you go to the Indies, my Mary?" Sang Robin in days long ago; And still clear as a carol of morning His notes in sweet melody flow. "Will you go to the Indies, my Mary?" Thy footsteps have wandered in music, Like a wide-arching rainbow of glory Resplendent with faith and devotion Yon star-sprinkled "Pathway of Angels Gleams white as when Love gave it birth, But Burns and his Mary are nearer With pathway that circles the earth; Where lovers in rapture will wander Till the stars grow pale in their journey, And cold on the eyelids of morning Hang the darkness and dews of the night; Till then, ay, till then, and forever, Shall the song of our sweet Highland Mary "THE COTTAR'S SATURDAY NIGHT." BY REV. WILLIAM WYE SMITH, ST. CATHERINES, ONTARIO. A GREAT many people think only of Burns as the author of "Auld Lang Syne," or the song of "Highland Mary," and wonder at the partiality and enthusiasm of the Scotch for their national poet. A friend of mine once met the objections of one of this sort of people-who believe" Burns's writings quite unfit for anyone of refined taste to read "by repeating to him a considerable portion of "The Cottar's Saturday Night." The man was pleased, his prejudice disarmed, and his interest excited. The only three facts connected with the poem that I know are these: First, Burns took his brother Gilbert into his confidence when he was writing it (as doubtless it cost him a number of sittings) and the brothers discussed it together. Gilbert had no poetry, but he was a man of good sense, and we may not doubt that some of his suggestions bore fruit in emendations and improvements of the poem. Burns probably considered this piece to be good English (as Leyden, a few years after, wrote of his own poem, "Scenes of Fancy," "which everybody here admits to be good English!") only we may lay down an approach to a general principle, that when a Scotchman asserts his writings to be "very good English" it is open to us to examine the matter a little before we accept it wholly. Certainly "The Cottar's Saturday Night," though in all the artificiality of the Spenserian stanza, has three or four dozen words that Burns himself a few years after found necessary to put into his "Glossary." The second fact in connection with "The Cottar's Saturday Night" is this. At a friend's house a lad, son of his host, told Burns he did not like to read the poem, for "it made him shed tears." My boy," said Burns, "it cost me, I know, a good many tears to write it." 66 The third fact is connected with Mrs. Dunlop, Burns's good friend, whom he celebrates as "a Wallace," for she was indeed descended from Sir Malcolm Wallace, brother of the Scottish hero. Sir William Wallace left no family. Mrs. Dunlop was not only the descendant but the heiress of the house of Wallace, and brought to her husband the old homestead of Craigie. There is a wonderful bit of heredity in connection with the family of Mrs. Dunlop. In 183-(I am not sure of the year) the well-known Scottish author Robert Chambers was pursuing on foot a lonely road în Dumfriesshire when he met a carriage, and in it a gentleman, who with the setting sun shining in his face and lighting up his features, struck Chambers with his strong resemblance to the pictures we have of Sir William Wallace. He could not dismiss this wonderful likeness from his mind, and on enquiring at a wayside inn, a little farther on, they told him that the coachman had stopped to water his horses as he passed, and that the gentleman was General Dunlop, a son of Burns's old friend, and through his mother a descendant of Sir Malcolm Wallace, and the possessor (after 500 years) of the Wallace features! We have only one side of the somewhat extended correspondence between Burns and Mrs. Dunlop. After Burns's death she purchased back her own letters to Burns, by laying down to Dr. Currie, the poet's first biographer, a letter of Burns for a letter of her own to Burns; and thus, letter by letter, she secured all her own, while she gave the world all Burns's. I am not aware these letters of hers have ever been published. The more's the pity! In one of them, however, she tells the poet the criticism of an old crone, her "housekeeper." "She did not see much in that poem of Mr. Burns; she had heard and seen just the same in her father's house many a time!" As a little study of Scotch I propose to make the Scottish words in "The Cottar's Saturday Night" plainer to the general reader. Burns seems to have warmed up in the latter part of the poem, and sped along in good classical English, for the last eight or nine stanzas :— Then kneeling down to Heaven's Eternal King, No more to sigh, or shed the bitter tear, In such society, yet still more dear; While circling time moves round in an eternal sphere. Compared with this, how poor Religion's pride, When men display to congregations wide, The Power, incens'd, the pageant will desert, May hear, well pleased, the language of the soul; Then homeward all take off their several way; But, chiefly, in their hearts with grace divine preside. But before this there is what he elsewhere calls "a sprinkling of Scotch". -some of it probably unconscious to himself. A "cottar" is one who lives in a cot or cottage, having a little bit of garden attached, and often the privilege of a cow's grass. He works for the farmer by "the term," or by the year. The figures prefixed indicate the stanzas of the poem in which the words occur. (2) Sugh or sough—a whistling, echoing sound, as of the wind. "The sough o' the sea " is often spoken of-the more that the alliteration is so "catching." It must always be pronounced as a guttural. Frae-from. Our forefathers often said "fro." The Scotch say "frae." "Fro has gone out of use, however, except in the phrase "to and fro." Pleugh or pleuch-the plow. The word is generally (when a noun) pronounced as a guttural; occasionally, however, as "plew" in sound. It is always pronounced "plew" when a verb. Here, as it rhymes with the guttural "sugh," it is properly a guttural itself. Moil is an English as well as a Scotch word; though it is almost obsolete with us, and simply means exhausting labor. 66 (3) Stacher is from the same root as stagger." It is a guttural. Flichterin'-fluttering. A beautiful picture of little children, with unsteady steps and outstretched arms, fluttering along to meet the home-coming cottar. The ch is guttural. Kaiugh, sometimes spelt caigh; in either form with the gh guttural. In many editions of Burns the word is cark. However spelt, it is pronounced in one syllable. It seems always to be associated with "care," the alliteration helping it on. The Italians say carco, |