98 NORTHERN MEMOIRS. 



of your unexperience in these northern tracts, I 

 shall direct our course through the coast of Gal- 

 loway, a compendium of the Highlands im- 

 merg'd in the arms of the Low-lands ; and I'll ap- 

 peal to your self, when you have seen her fertili- 

 ty, if you do not envy her blest inhabitants, be- 

 cause inrich'd with the plenty of rivers and ri- 

 vulets, woods and groves ; besides benevolent 

 fields, and profitable pastures. Yet sometimes 

 we must ramble o're some rotten bogs, as now 

 we do ; and permit our feet (as at other times) 

 to climb those knotty craggy mountains, that, 

 like a gnomen, direct to the town of Kilmar- 

 nock, a kind of a corporation, where we may ex- 

 pect the comfortable issues of good entertain- 

 ment ; for worse than the last is madness to con- 

 template. 



Theoph. Is that the town that presents at a 

 distance ? 



Am. Yes, that is Kilmarnock, an antient cor- 

 poration, heap'd up and crowded with men and 

 mechanicks ; through the midst of whose crazy 

 tottering ports, there runs a river replenished 

 with trout, where we may treat our appetites, as 

 already our apprehensions, with the entertain- 

 ments of Dumbarton, whose rapid streams, when 

 we come to examine them, are enough, one 

 would think, to surfeit the angler. To which 

 place it is now but one day's journy, nor need 



