fund for the education and security of his children. But Miller was not easily discouraged. He had evidently decided that the poet as a tenant would be an asset to Dalswinton. Accordingly he urged Burns to go down again and have a more critical look at the place. A severe cold which confined him to the house enabled Burns again to evade committing himself and not long afterwards came the injury to his knee which laid him up for weeks and involved him in the Clarinda affair. But meanwhile his endeavours for an Excise commission were not prospering. Glencairn disapproved; Mrs. Dunlop disapproved; apparently everyone who might have exerted the necessary influence disapproved. In January Miss Nimmo sent him to a Mrs. Stewart who was supposed to have influence with the commissioners. The interview was not a success. Burns came away from it boiling with helpless rage. He had been questioned like a child about his most private affairs and Mrs. Stewart had further improved the occasion by rebuking him for the Jacobite sentiments he had scratched on the window of the inn at Stirling. If the quest for an Excise job was to expose him to this sort of thing Burns was ready to throw up the whole project. Just when the matter appeared most hopeless his chance came from an unexpected quarter. The surgeon who had treated his injured knee was Alexander Wood, better known to his fellow-citizens as Lang Sandy Wood, who after a wild youth had become one of the most respectable characters, in both senses of that word, in Edinburgh. Wood learned of his patient’s desire and offered to do what Glencairn and the others had refused or evaded--to bring Burns’s case directly and personally before the Board. The result was that before he left Edinburgh Burns found himself, ‘without any mortifying solicitation’ on his own part, equipped with the official order for the six-weeks’ course of special instructions which would entitle him to an Excise commission. It came none too soon. One of the rules of the service was that no man could enter it who was in debt, who was more than thirty years old, or who had more than three children. Burns’s time for meeting these two latter qualifications was getting very short indeed.