In the later eighteenth century smuggling rated as one of the major British industries. An excise tax of twenty shillings a gallon on spirits set an even higher premium on illicit dealing than prohibition did in the United States in the 1920’s. Few of the ‘best people’ had any more scruples about dealing with smugglers than Americans had about dealing with bootleggers. Nor was smuggling confined to liquors. Tea, French silks and laces, and other goods on which the tariff was high were also run in in quantity. The coast near Kirkoswald was a centre for landing goods intended for the Ayrshire and Glasgow markets because it was almost the last point smuggling vessels could approach without grave risk of being trapped by the revenue cutters in the narrow waters of the Firth of Clyde. Samuel Brown, the uncle with whom Burns stayed at Kirkoswald, probably had a quiet share in the business; at any rate his nephew saw plenty of smugglers. In the taverns where these men spent the profits of their successful ventures Burns witnessed roistering of a wilder sort than market nights at Ayr exhibited. His extremely limited means, however, make it improbable that he often looked unconcernedly on a large tavern bill, though ten years later he thought he had. More likely the awkward youth was a spectator, as the poet was at Poosie Nansie’s in 1785. A Shakespearian delight in the salty flavour of raw humanity was one of Burns’s life-long characteristics which first found expression at Kirkoswald. In 1783 he wrote to John Murdoch, ‘I seem to be one sent into the world, to see, and observe; and I very easily compound with the knave who tricks me of my money, if there be anything original about him which shews me human nature in a different light from anything I have seen before.’ His respectable friends often deplored what seemed to them a depraved taste for low company, but, as his best friend in Dumfries explained, it was not the lowness of the company that attracted him; his companions were of ‘low ranks, but men of talent and humour’. It was the colour of such company, its shrewdness, its reckless wit, and its unashamed gusto for life that made Burns prefer it to the drab respectability of the church-going bourgeoisie.