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 zom 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 /é¢e 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 
