It was Fate's throw with which I had to reckon first. I had come in my musings to a side-path which led from the old Abbey to the foot-bridge, when I heard the sound of a man's singing: "As I cam in by Glenap, I met wi' an ancient woman, Who told me to cheer my heart up For the best of my days were comin'." The singer was sitting upon a fallen tree, beside a smoking fire, with the women, children, aye, and the very dogs, gathered about him as though he carried a charm. He was a thick-set man, dark and swarthy, with a pair of eyes literally glowing. His hat was cocked upon the back of his head, and he had his plaid thrown around him in a certain manner known to himself alone. He was eating and drinking with these gipsy-folk, for he'd a bannock in one hand and a mug of hot drink in the other, but at sight of me he set them down and came forward to greet me; and my amazed eyes rested on Robert Burns himself, as though raised up by some of his own witches to fit into my thoughts--Robert Burns whom I had met at Mauchline before he was famous, the year before. He inquired if I were stepping townward, and on the instant I asked him to breakfast with me at the Star and Garter, and this, you will remember, within five short minutes of my resolve to burn his book and keep him out of our lives. It was charged against me later that I was lax in this Burns affair and, because of my own infatuation for men of parts, took too little thought for the temptation to which I exposed my daughter. I answer the accusation by telling the circumstances exactly as they fell, and he who reads may judge the truth of these charges for himself. As we came to the door of the inn, I asked Creech and Dundas, who happened to be passing, to join us at the breakfast, and a merry feast it was, and one for the three of us to hold as a lifelong memory, for only those who had the honor to know Burns could understand that the "best of him was in his talk." In the year of which I write all the eyes of Edinburgh were fixed upon him, and his toasts, his epigrams, his love affairs were the scandal of the town and his own countryside. There was some flouting of him at this very meal, I recall, by Creech, who was deep in his affairs, concerning a Mauchline lassie who had thrown his love back at him with some violence and scandal; but he was not in the least dashed either by the event or the naming of it, and, seizing a glass, he called out, with the jolliest laugh in the world: "Their tricks and crafts hae put me daft, They've ta'en me in--and a' that, But clear your decks! and here's 'The Sex,' I like the jades for a' that,"---- the applause which greeted this sally bringing the servants to the window, though, in fact, when it was known that Burns was in the house there was no keeping them out of the room.