amount never passed reasonable bounds. As soon as the excitement over the sedition charges subsided his prospects in the Excise brightened steadily. Friends in Edinburgh were secretly trying to get him transferred to a more lucrative position, but even in Dumfries things looked hopeful. At the end of December, 1794, Supervisor Findlater fell ill, and Burns took over his duties. The work lasted three months or more, and though it is uncertain if Burns received any extra pay for his labour he at least gained valuable experience and competently handled his complex duties. The only adverse criticism of his conduct related to a technical irregularity in his final report, and this was the fault not of Burns himself but of one of his subordinates. The passage of each year brought him higher on the list of candidates for supervisor’s posts. Had he lived another year or two he would automatically have been appointed even if his Edinburgh friends had failed in their efforts to hasten the process. The prospect of promotion was becoming very real--so real that during the very months when he was acting as supervisor Burns devoted some of his scanty leisure to composing a group of political ballads. Patrick Heron of Heron--the same Heron whose bank failure had once ruined half Ayrshire--was the Whig candidate in a by-election at Kirkcudbright. In return for the support of Burns’s pen Heron asked if he could do anything for the poet. Burns’s reply showed his mind at its coldest level of realism. Nothing could be done, he said, for two or three years, until he reached the head of the supervisors’ list. Then a political friend could be of service in getting him appointed in some agreeable part of the kingdom and of still more service in hastening his next step in rank. Collectorships went by favour, and the time he must spend in the drudgery of a supervisorship would therefore depend on the amount of influence his friends could exert. The letter is graphic proof of Burns’s open-eyed acceptance of the system in which he worked; it is also proof of his irrepressible lack of discretion. From the viewpoint of mere self-interest he would have done better to hold aloof from all political contests and, when the time came, to base his appeal for influence upon his standing as a poet instead of identifying himself with any party. But such calm calculation was not in his nature.