But now that he saw an open road into the Excise Burns’s mind veered round. Farming after all was a more poetical occupation than ‘searching auld wives’ barrels’. Miller was still urging Ellisland upon him, and the possibility of failure there did not look so black when he knew that if he did fail he had the Excise to turn to. He agreed to revisit the farm. No doubt he told himself, as he told Clarinda, that he did so only out of courtesy to Miller, knowing that the Excise must be his lot. His judgement warned him that the farm would not do; his emotions swayed him in its favour. In an effort to strengthen his judgement he invited his old friend, John Tennant of Glenconner, to join the tour of inspection. Glenconner’s mind would not be biased by any poetic considerations. It did not occur to Burns that even the most experienced of farmers, looking at soil different from that he was accustomed to, could scarcely gauge its productivity rightly at the end of February. The rule-of-thumb farming which Glenconner and most of his contemporaries practised required the sight of growing crops for correct judgement. Tennant looked the place over and told Burns it was a bargain at Miller’s price. The opinion astonished the poet, but he failed to realize that it was merely a guess less accurate than the opinion he himself had formed on seeing the place the previous June. Burns frequently made mistakes, but his worst ones were made when he relied on other people’s judgement. In March he signed Miller’s lease and committed himself to three years of struggle and discouragement which swallowed all the capital which had not already been poured into the bottomless morass of Mossgiel. Legend has it that Burns was offered his choice of two farms on the Dalswinton estate and selected Ellisland because of its more attractive location--‘a poet’s choice and not a farmer’s’. In fact Miller offered no choice, and in drawing up the lease employed all the usual legal technicalities with one or two additions of his own. The rent was to be £50 a year for the first three years and £70 thereafter, and Miller’s zeal for improvements was to have scope even while the tenant was in possession. The landlord reserved the right to take over the riverbank, a twenty-yard-wide belt along the Friars Carse boundary, and two acres of other land at his own choice to plant with trees. He agreed, however, to put money of his own into the place. It had not even a farmhouse when Burns signed the lease, and Miller undertook to provide adequate buildings. The contractor’s delay in constructing these caused further needless anxiety and actual loss to Burns.