Laggan is, nevertheless, a remarkable place, for Burns and Nicol must have been there together in some fashion, if not a Bacchanalian one, since it was upon the recommendation of the former that the latter became its proprietor. There are, however, two Laggans--one in Dunscore parish, about two miles from Ellisland; the other in Glencairn parish, a comparatively remote situation; and the latter was the Laggan of Nicol. Mr M----, of A----, who now lives near Ellisland, remembers, while living in his father's house, Laggan of Dunscore--the place erroneously assumed by Cunningham--that Burns and Nicol came there rather late one evening, and induced his father to accompany them to the town of Minniehive, whence he did not return home till next day at three o'clock. Laggan of Glencairn being on the way to Minniehive, and near it, and there being no other imaginable reason for Nicol going to such an out-of-the-way place, it seems a very reasonable supposition, that the pair of friends were on their way to see the property which Nicol thought of purchasing; and that Burns, knowing Mr M---- to be well skilled in land, had thought of asking his advice on its value. The junior Mr M---- adds a reminiscence, too characteristic, we fear, to be much doubted, that Burns and Nicol on that occasion were for a whole week engaged in merry-making. We had, therefore, a half-melancholy interest in seeing Laggan--a name, we felt, associated with reckless gaieties, but then they were the gaieties of genius, and well had they been moralised in the punishments which they drew down--for, as Currie remarks in 1799, these 'three merry boys' were already all of them under the turf. Our kind host, the successor of Masterton's, took us in his carriage across the Nith, through a scene of natural luxuriance and beauty not to be surpassed, and under a sun of as intense brilliancy as ever shone in these climes. Passing into a high side-valley, we soon left the glowing plains of Nithsdale behind. We passed under the farmstead of Laggan of Dunscore, and thought of Burns and Nicol coming there to seduce the worthy farmer away to partake of their festivities at Minniehive. By and by we came to Dunscore kirk, which Burns used to attend with his family while resident at Ellisland--a gloomy-looking man, the people thought him, all the time that he, with his generous, benevolent nature, was in reality groaning over the stern Calvinistic theology of the preacher. It is a tract of country which has but recently been reclaimed from a marshy and moorish state, and which still shews only partial traces of decoration and high culture. In a gloomy recess among the hills, we caught a glimpse of the situation of the old castle of Lagg, a fortalice surrounded by bogs, the ancient residence of the persecutor Grierson of Lagg, and fit scene to be connected with the history of a man who could coolly stand to see innocent women drowned at a stake in the sea for conscience' sake. The