For three days the horrid weather kept them housebound; three days in which Nancy and Robert Burns lived in dangerous nearness to each other, considering her youth, her temperament, and the passion of admiration which she held for him; three days of poetry and folk-tales and ballad-singing, with the man's dangerous magnetism at work between them. It was on the afternoon of this third day that a girl passed the window near which Burns sat, and beckoning to him, he slammed out into the storm, with no prefacing word to his act whatever, leaving Nancy staring after him in amazement, as she said to Mr. Hamilton: "Do you not think his manners are strange?" "The Edinburgh people say that he had them straight from his Maker," Mr. Hamilton answered, evading an opinion of his own. "It's no saying much for the breeding of the Almighty," she answered, off-hand, with a smile, and she held silence concerning the matter, although it was near upon four days before Burns entered the inn door again, his face pale and haggard, his eyes sunken, and lines of dissipation upon his handsome face, which every one by courtesy passed over uncommented. He brought a volume of Shenstone with him, which he laid before Nancy as a gift. "I am bringing you one of the great of the earth," he said, gloomily regarding the book, and Nancy, who read his thoughts and wanted from the heart to cheer him, said: "I whiles wonder at you, Mr. Burns, and the way you go about admiring every tinker-peddler who tosses a rhyme together. Ye've no sense of your own value at times. Do you know," she went on, fair glorious to see in her enthusiasm glowering down at him--"Do you know that when this man Shenstone's grave is as flat to the earth as my hand, and his name forgot, people will be building monuments to you and raising schools for your memory. Why," she cried, in an ecstasy, "'tis you that have made our old mother Scotland able to hold up her head and look the whole world in the face when the word 'Poetry' is called." "Ye think so?" he asked, the tears big in his eyes, his gloom put behind him. "It's music to hear ye praise me so," and he rose and leaned against the mantel-shelf, his face irradiated by its usual expression. "Perhaps," he began with some hope, "when I say farewell to rakery once and for all, I may make something fine yet. Most men, Mistress Stair, shake hands with that irresponsible wench called Pleasure, but I have dallied too long, I fear, in her intoxicating society. Aye!" he finished, "Wisdom's late upon the road!"[5] [5] It is strange to note that there is scarce a word spoken by Burns in all of Lord Stair's manuscript which can not be found directly or indirectly in the poet's prose or verse--EDITOR. "Let's make a poem of it! It sounds like one!" she cried, moving toward the spinet. "Take your own gate," says Burns, laughing; "I'll follow!" "I'll take the first lines," she said gayly. "'Twill throw the brunt of the rhyming on you."