138 Transactions. 



that the pavements " might be improved " — a suggestion seasonable 

 for many years afterwards. The schools of Dumfries, he tells us, 

 had been long eminent, and that many very able scholars had 

 received their initiatory classical education there, there having been 

 a succession of three of the ablest teachers of the Latin language 

 known for some time in Scotland, namely, Mr Trotter, Dr 

 Chapman, and Mr Waite, the then rector. Heron's estimate of 

 the townsmen, and his description of the Saturnalia going on on 

 the occasion of his visit, are so fully quoted in Mr M'Dowall's 

 excellent History that it is unnecessary to repeat them here. His 

 description of the race-week is doubtless exaggerated ; at the same 

 time, making every allowance for that, one cannot but perceive 

 how dangerous a place Dumfries must have been for a man of 

 Burns's temperament. The author of the curious and interest- 

 ing " Autobiography of a Beggar Boy " (James Burn) begins 

 his memoir with the remark that where or how he came 

 into the world he had no very distinct idea (not, by the 

 way, a very uncommon experience), but that the first place he 

 found himself in was a garret in the High Street of Dumfries about 

 the year 1806. Burn did not remain long in Dumfries ; but 

 forty years later in his chequered career he travelled from Newton- 

 Stewart to the town. He found great changes everywhere, mostly 

 for the better. " I found," he says, " villages where formerly there 

 was not the vestige of a house, and in other places ruins where I 

 had formerly seen cheerful dwellings. I could see no greater 

 change in that part of the country than what was observable in the 

 condition of the soil ; everywhere the hand of industry was 

 abundantly visible in the improved state of the land. In one place 

 hundreds of acres of moorlands were reclaimed, and in another 

 what had been a deep bog was drained and bearing a rich harvest 

 of grain." 



"G. W., Haddington," is the 710111 de plume of a Rev. D. 

 Laing, probably a Dissenting minister of some sort, who travelled 

 through the southern and western counties of Scotland in 1817, 

 and published a journal of his tour in a thin duodecimo. Mr Laing 

 arrived in Dumfries on the last day of May in the year above 

 mentioned, and, like Heron, found the town en fete on this occasion 

 owing to the shooting for the Silver Gun. He was wakened the 

 next morning in a fright by the banging of the Midsteeple bells, 

 summoning the Trades to their muster on the Sands. On the 



