According to one interpretation of a letter from Francis Grose to Burns in January, 1791, they must have proceeded at once to an autumn visit at Friars Carse, where Grose was also a guest. Grose told Burns that ‘after the Scene between Mrs. Riddell Jun^r and your humble Servant, to which you was witness, it is impossible I can ever come under her Roof again.’ The letter also refers to the Governor--‘a spoilt Child with a Number of good Qualities’--whom its editor identifies as Walter Riddell, Mrs. Riddell Junior being Maria. But there was also an extremely senior Mrs. Riddell at Friars Carse, for Robert’s grandmother lived with him. Hence the Junior may equally well have been Mrs. Robert Riddell, and inasmuch as Maria had no roof of her own in Scotland until 1792, it is hard to see how any misconduct of hers could have shut Friars Carse to Grose. If this was really Maria’s first meeting with Burns it was an inauspicious start. But the early stages of the friendship are obscure. The extant correspondence does not begin until February, 1792, and by that time Maria’s life was so truly invaluable to Burns that to lose her would leave a vacuum in his enjoyments that nothing could fill up. By this time, too, she was the mother of a daughter, born in England in August, 1791. Her husband was again in Dumfries, negotiating for an estate, and Maria had gone to Edinburgh with the double purpose of seeking expert medical advice and finding a printer for her narrative of her voyage to the West Indies. To this latter end Burns introduced her to his old friend Smellie in a letter which paid the highest compliments to her intellectual and literary accomplishments--if it can be called a high compliment to say that her verses ‘always correct, and often elegant’, were ‘very much beyond the common run of Lady Poetesses of the day’. The introduction resulted in a friendship between Smellie and Maria of which the written records, being more decorous than Burns’s own letters to the printer, were published by the latter’s biographer. Maria liked to collect curios, and her interest in Smellie might perhaps be thus explained. But the gruff and erudite printer’s continued interest in Maria is further evidence that she had brains as well as charm, though her letters are evidence enough.