The owners of the cattle lived in a style which an Iroquois would have thought primitive. Gilbert Burns resented the statement that his famous brother was born in a hovel. The Alloway cottage, he declared, was better than the houses then occupied by many substantial farmers. So it was. It had a chimney, whereas in many a cottage and farmhouse, long after Burns’s youth--Keats saw plenty of them in Ayrshire in 1818--such of the smoke as did not enter the eyes and lungs of the tenants escaped through the door. But even with a chimney the average farmhouse or labourer’s cottage, with its walls of stone or rammed clay, its earthen floor and thatched roof, and with the fire seldom built up except for cooking, had a winter chill and dampness that bred tuberculosis in the young and rheumatism in the old. As at Alloway, the stable was usually under the same roof, and its reek mingled with the dampness and the smell of unwashed humanity. An English proverb in the seventeenth century asserted that the Scots had neither bellows, warming-pans, nor houses of office; and that the proverb still held in the eighteenth is proved alike by experiences of Johnson and Boswell in gentlemen’s homes in the Highlands and by episodes in the chapbooks of Dugal Graham which reveal the same use of the fireplace as Shakespeare records of the inn at Rochester. Outside the door was the midden-dub or glaur-hole, manure-heap of man and beast alike, often so surrounded with stagnant water that the ‘rather pretty’ girl whom Keats saw standing at a cow-house door in the Highlands, ‘fac’d all up to the ankles in dirt’, would in the Lowlands a generation earlier have been a sight too commonplace to excite remark. When the seepage from the midden-dub reached the water-supply the cycle of filth and typhoid was complete. Dead animals which could not be eaten were usually dumped into the nearest stream, so that if the water-supply was not contaminated in one way, it was pretty sure to be in another. But unless the animal were a horse, it had to be very dead indeed not to be eaten. Sheep that had died by accident or disease had a special name--‘braxies’--and were the perquisite of the shepherds; the flesh of diseased cattle was sometimes the only meat farm servants tasted; in Edinburgh young Henry Mackenzie once observed two bakers of cheap ‘mutton pies’ suspiciously engaged by night about the carcass of a horse on the bank at the back of the Castle.