A cruel scoundrel of a haberdasher, to whom I owe an account, taking it into his head that I am dying, has commenced a process, and will infallibly put me in jail.

Do, for God's sake, send that sum, and that by return of post. Forgive me this earnestness, but the horrors of a jail have made me half distracted. I do not ask all this gratuitously, for, upon returning health, I hereby promise and engage to furnish you with five pounds worth of the neatest song-genius you have seen!"

On the same day Burns wrote to Mr. Thompson for aid, he wrote to Mr. James Burnes of Montrose, his relative, asking for a loan of ten pounds, which was sent at once.

He wrote also, the same day, to Mrs. Dunlop, his last letter to that lady:

He says: "I have written you so often, without receiving any answer that I would not trouble you again but for the circumstance in which I am. An illness which has hung about me, in all probability will speedily send me beyond that 'bourne from whence no traveler returns.' Your friendship, with which for many years you honored me, was a friendship dearest to my soul. Your conversation, and especially your correspondence, were at once highly entertaining and instructive.

With what pleasure did I break open the seal! The remembrance yet adds one pulse more to my poor palpitating heart! Farewell!"

The night before leaving Brow for his desolate home in Dumfries, he took tea with Mrs. Craig, the widow of the minister of Ruthwell. His altered appearance created silent sympathy at the tea table, and Miss Craig, the daughter of the host, thinking the evening sun-light too much for the poet, rose to let down the window blinds, when he looked at the young lady benignly and said: "Thank you, my dear,

for your kind attention; but oh! let the sun shine, he will not shine long for me!"

On the 18th of July, Burns left Brow on his return to Dumfries, in a small spring cart.

When he arrived at his own door, the neighbors saw that he could hardly stand on his feet, and with tottering steps was helped into the house.

The news soon spread through the town, that Burns had returned home in a dying condition, and every one seemed to mourn for his situation as a family bereavement.

Allan Cunningham, who was present at the Burns cot, says:

"The anxiety of the people, high and low, was very great. Wherever two or three were together, their talk was of Burns, and of him alone. They spoke of his history, of his person, and of his works; of his witty sayings, and sarcastic replies, and of his too early fate; with much enthusiasm, and sometimes with deep feeling. All that he had done and

all that they had hoped he would accomplish, were talked of. Half a dozen of the people stopped Dr. Maxwell in the street, and would say: 'How is Burns, sir?' He shook his head, saying, 'He cannot be worse,' and passed on, to be subjected to similar inquiries along the street. I heard one

of a group inquire with much simplicity, 'Who do you think will be our poet now?'

He tried to keep up his spirit, by humorous remarks on his death bed, and said to one of his brother volunteers, 'John, don't let the awkward squad fire over me!'

His sick wife was unable to move from her bed, and his four children wandered around the room like lost kittens in a garret. But Jessie Lewars was there to see to his dying wants and superintend his household."

On the evening of the 21st of July, 1796, as the warm

sunset beams flashed over the Scotch fields, streams and blooming hills, Burns, with his four children by his bedside, fell into an eternal sleep, and his troubled spirit passed into the silent halls of death!

The news of the death of Burns flashed over Scotland as if a forest fire roared his departure, or the alarm fire bells of night rung over a silent city!

The young, old, poor and rich, mourned for the early death of such a gifted man, and they found their great loss when too late to minister to his daily wants.

A fund was started for the relief of his wife and children, and a great public funeral turned out to accompany the crumbling remains of the poet to a lonely corner of St. Michael's churchyard.

His poor body was removed a couple of times for the vanity of those who put up monuments to a genius in death and starve him in life!

No poet ever lived whose heart beat closer to the pulsations of old Mother Earth than Burns, and none ever sung more delightful melodies for the glory of his native land!

He has, by his poetry and songs, lifted the cold, canny, imperturbable Scot out of his shilling reason and elevated him, in all climes, into the warm and festive citizen of to-day.

The peasantry of the fields and hills of Scotland, as well as the working men in mines, mills and sea-faring avocations, owe an everlasting debt of gratitude to the ploughman poet, for teaching them how to hold up their heads into the sunlight of personal liberty, and have the bravery to demand equal rights and justice for all Scotchmen!

The pampered scholars and professors of Edinburgh and Glasgow; sacerdotal agents, and the lords of the mountains and the isles, never did anything practical for the common people of Caledonia, until the torch of poetic liberty was

flashed in their startled faces by the bold and brilliant Burns.

He showed that a king, prince, duke, earl or lord, was no more in the eyes of God and nature, than the poorest peasant at the plough or the wheel; and when Death knocked at the doors of the rich and powerful, they left all their golden store and could not take a dollar away:

Robert Burns will be a theme for literary contemplation to the last syllable of recorded time!

Measured by money he was a failure, but measured by

mind he was a magnificent success. He had principle without policy, pride without arrogance, and wisdom without vanity.

Truth and sincerity were the foundation stones of his character and love was the lightning that shot across the murky atmosphere of his soul, and even purified the poverty and sordid elements that surrounded him in the rustic wilds of Caledonia.

We deplore his sins and sorrows; yet secretly sympathize and forgive his impulsive eccentricities, as we expect forgiveness for our own cunning cupidity and hypocritical words and actions.

The honest and intense humanity of Burns is what made him famous in his day, and will continue to make him great adown the circling centuries.

His personal peculiarities with women, wine and song, were not half as culpable as the so-called divine actions of Noah, David and Solomon, and yet these biblical birds are honored in the religious temples of to-day, as models of socalled divine virtue!

The temptations and seductions of a poet are numerous and constant, by the wiles of Venus and Bacchus, and greater ones than poor Burns, like Homer, Horace, Dante, Tasso, Petrarch, Shakespeare, Byron, and Edgar Allan Poe, fell before the entertaining allurements of female beauty and the intoxicating pleasures of the wine cup!

It is hard for the practical, financial, business part of mankind to appreciate a poet, for while people are delving in the ditches of golden expectation and realization, he is soaring aloft into the realm of the ideal, sporting with the muses of the soul and extracting melodies from the heaven of beauty, to illuminate and glorify the homes and halls of the whole human race.