The renewed friendship had not long to live. Shadows of another sort soon began to fall across it, for Burns’s health was breaking. A note written at the end of May to accompany the loan of the Reid miniature mentioned that he was so ill as scarcely to be able to hold pen to paper; a month later he feared that his health was gone forever. The autumn brought further affliction in the death of his little daughter, and it was to Maria that he uttered the only existing record of his grief: ‘That you, my friend, may never experience such a loss as mine, sincerely prays R B.’ And so, through bereavement, illness, and despair, the passionate, irritable poet and the vivacious young woman of the world drew towards their last meeting. The bleak little watering-place, the Brow Well on the Solway, was the scene. Maria’s health also was bad, and she evidently, like Burns, lacked the funds to take her to a better resort. On the 5th of July, 1796, she sent her carriage for Burns: not until she saw him did she realize how serious his condition was. He was dying, and knew it. His overdriven heart, which had never wholly recovered from the strain of doing a man’s work on insufficient food at the age of fourteen, was giving out, and he was hastening his end according to the best medical advice in Dumfries. A doctor who thought that angina was ‘flying gout’ had ordered sea bathing, and the dying poet was plunging himself daily in the chilly waters of the Solway, as he had earlier in life sought to cure fainting-fits in a tub of cold water at his bedside. Maria was startled by the visible stamp of death on the features of the emaciated man who tottered from her carriage, and her concern was increased by his almost total inability to eat. But the presence of a young and attractive woman could still, as always, rouse Burns to his best efforts, and his talk might even have been gay--after his preliminary, ‘Well, Madam, have you any messages for the other world?’--had Maria been able to forget his haggard countenance long enough to reply in kind. As it was, they had ‘a long and serious conversation about his present situation, and the approaching termination of all his earthly prospects.’ The man who had never lied about himself, to himself or others, now frankly faced the fact that he was dying. And the presence of a sympathetic and intelligent listener urged him on to speech about the matters nearest his heart. Two things perturbed him on the brink of the grave--anxiety for his family, and anxiety for his fame. His eldest son was not yet ten; there were three younger, and Jean was hourly expecting a fifth; at least two others needed a father’s help to lighten the stigma of illegitimacy. And as for his literary reputation--