Having once got his appointment, however, Burns had no intention of treating it as a sinecure. His district covered twelve sparsely-settled parishes and his tours of inspection required, to fulfil the letter of the law, that he ride two hundred miles a week in all weathers and all states of the uniformly bad roads. This meant that he could give little of his time and less of his strength to Ellisland. To provide for the farm he endeavoured to increase his dairy stock, which Jean could supervise in the intervals of having babies and managing her household. The cattle, too, might help in the slow task of rebuilding the worn-out acres. But the strain of his new duties soon took physical toll. In the late fall of 1789, after less than two months of service, ‘a malignant squinancy and low fever’ laid him up for six weeks. His handwriting indicates that the illness was really serious; the letters written during convalescence are in a hand almost as weak and straggling as that of June and July, 1796. Nevertheless he had proved his qualifications for the job. An official report on various subordinate officers in the Excise bears after Burns’s name the notation ‘a poet--never tried--turns out well.’ He had moreover established friendly relations with his immediate superiors, Alexander Findlater, the Supervisor, and John Mitchell, the Collector, of the Dumfries district. With the latter, indeed, he was already on terms approaching intimacy, sending him gifts of new-laid eggs from Ellisland and accompanying them at least once with a poetic epistle so broadly humorous that no editor has ever printed it all. Both men testified to Burns’s fidelity by defending his character after his death and--what is far more significant--by reporting favourably on him during his life.