He was giving reason for favourable reports. His predecessor had been so slack that Burns was able to appear, at the first session of court after he began duty, with an impressive array of cases of tax evasion. In handling these he again displayed political astuteness. The minor offenders, mostly poor men who could ill afford a fine, he begged off with warnings or suspended sentences. This almost compelled the magistrates to fine the larger offenders for whom he refused to intercede, and inasmuch as Excise officers then, like American customs inspectors today, received a percentage of these penalties, Burns found his procedure remunerative in cash as well as in official credit. He soon discovered, though, that zeal had its drawbacks. Gentlemen of position, including some of the magistrates themselves, had their favourite smugglers or home-brewers, and when Burns caught one of these he started all the machinery of influence and political pressure so familiar to Americans during the prohibition era. Once he told Collector Mitchell, after a hard day’s riding in rounding up witnesses in a case, that he expected for his pains to be clapped in jail for annoying the friends of half the gentlemen in the county. The grosser temptations of bribery, however, did not touch him. The various legends, deriving from highly unreliable oral tradition, of his leniency with small offenders mean no more, even if literally true, than that Burns had learned the common sense of his profession. A customs inspector knows that his job is not to penalize every tourist who has failed to declare a dozen handkerchiefs but to catch the large-scale smuggler. The same was true of the laws Burns had to enforce, which imposed taxes on everything from whisky to candles. Not but what he made ordinary human distinctions between his public and his private capacities. William Lorimer, father of ‘Chloris’, was one of the poet’s intimate friends. He was also a bootlegger whose ways were, ‘like the grace of G--, past all comprehension’. Seemingly Lorimer maintained a moderate legal stock for inspection purposes, but once when he was absent and his wife drunk something slipped in the working of the gentlemen’s agreement, and Burns had to explain to Supervisor Findlater. Another time he helped, as revenue officer, in a series of raids on Dumfries haberdashers who had been selling smuggled French gloves. A few days later, as private citizen, he supplied Maria Riddell with similar gloves from a still unraided dealer’s stock. The problems and conditions of law enforcement are among the few immutables in human history.