SCOTTISH GAEDENS 



feature, like the flowery cliff at Auchencruive, preserves 

 a garden from the one defect as much as from the 

 other. I remember the Auchencruive garden thirty 

 years ago when sameness and tameness were at 

 their height, and that cliff stands out in memory, 

 wreathed with bright flowers, the broad river at 

 its foot sparkling in the sunlight and glimmering 

 in green gloom of old oaks on the further shore. 



At Auchencruive one is in the very heart of what 

 railway companies and hotel managers never weary 

 of proclaiming as the Land of Burns. Very charac- 

 teristic of the vates sacer, though hardly creditable to 

 his sense of delicacy, are the verses in which two 

 successive mistresses of the house of Auchencruive 

 are commemorated. The first of these was wife of 

 that Richard Oswald whom Shelburne appointed in 

 1782 as Minister-Plenipotentiary to negotiate the 

 treaty with the United States. Burns never met her 

 living, but in January, 1789, when riding through 

 Nithsdale, he stopped for the night at Sanquhar. 



" The frost was keen," he wrote to Dr. Moore, " and the 

 grim evening and howling wind were ushering in a night 

 of snow and drift. My horse and I were both much fatigued 

 with the labours of the day ; and just as my friend the bailie 

 [Whigham] and I were bidding defiance to the storm over a 

 smoking bowl, in wheels the funeral pageantry of the late Mrs 

 Oswald ; and poor I am forced to brave all the terrors of the 

 tempestuous night, and jade my horse my young favourite 

 horse whom I had just christened Pegasus further on, through 

 the wildest hills and moors of Ayrshire, to New Cumnock, 

 the next inn ! The powers of poesy and prose sink under 



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