Not until after his Edinburgh _Poems_ were off the press did it begin to dawn upon him that he might also win new fame in the drawing-room and--what meant much more to him--do a patriotic service to Scotland. In the last weeks of April, 1787, he made the acquaintance of an engraver named James Johnson, who was just bringing out the first volume of a work which he called _The Scots Musical Museum_. Johnson was known to Smellie, Dunbar, and others of Burns’s friends, but he cannot have been in the inner circle of the Crochallans, or Burns would have met him sooner. He was almost illiterate--his picturesquely bad spelling is notable even for the eighteenth century--but he was an enthusiast for the collection and preservation of the traditional music and songs of his country. He had invented a process for printing music by stamping the notes on pewter plates instead of the steel or copper engraving then generally employed. Though the result was a mean and smudgy page, the process was much cheaper than the old one and encouraged Johnson to try his hand at publishing. His enthusiasm, however, far exceeded his knowledge. He had had difficulty in gathering the hundred songs which made up his first volume, and had even eked it out with a few English pieces. His meeting with Burns not only remade the _Museum_, but, poetically considered, was the most important event of the poet’s life in the capital. Writing to Johnson on the eve of his Border tour Burns regretted that they had not met sooner: ‘I have met with few people whose company & conversation gave me more pleasure, because I have met with few whose sentiments are so congenial to my own.’ But though he contributed a song or two to the collection, the idea that he might take an active part in the work was still far from his mind. The fantastic Earl of Buchan, as early as February, had advised Burns to ‘fire [his] Muse at Scottish story and Scottish scene.’ Burns had replied, in language even more inflated than the Earl’s: ‘I wish for nothing more than to make a leisurely Pilgrimage through my native country; to sit & muse on those once hard-contended fields where Caledonia, rejoicing, saw her bloody lion borne through broken ranks to victory and fame; and catching the inspiration to pour the deathless Names in Song.’ Unfortunately, added the poet, he had instead to go back to working for his living. Nevertheless, the Border tour offered a chance to fulfil part of the Earl’s suggestion--according to Burns’s real tastes, if not the Earl’s. His greatest pleasures on the journey were not the civic receptions and the elaborate hospitality of the gentry, but the sight of Gala Water, Leader Haughs and Yarrow, the Bush aboon Traquair, Elibanks and Elibraes, and other spots celebrated in song. It made no difference whether the song was singable before ladies or before Crochallans, so long as it was Scottish, and old.