Masonic affiliations, which after his return from Irvine supplanted the Bachelors’ Club, gave him still another chance to indulge both his social instincts and his sympathies with liberal thought. A rural lodge like St. James’s at Tarbolton was, to be sure, no such centre of political liberalism as were the Masonic lodges of the Continent during the later eighteenth century. The chief activity, in fact, of most of the Scottish lodges seems to have been convivial, with the additional feature, lacking in the ordinary social club, that the members were pledged to help their fellows in sickness or distress. Nevertheless the knowledge that brother Masons in England and abroad were disseminating ideas which challenged absolutism in government and religion must have reached even village youths in Tarbolton. In Scotland, moreover, the ritual which dignified the childish thrill of membership in a secret organization gave Freemasonry an emotional appeal which the drab services of the Kirk and the narrow routine of every day lacked. From the time when he joined St. James’s Lodge, about 1782, until after his sojourn in Edinburgh, Burns took his Masonic duties with the utmost seriousness. He helped to put the struggling and almost bankrupt lodge on its feet; from 1784 to 1787 he was its Depute Master. In Edinburgh he continued his affiliations, and perhaps the highest moment of all his early triumphal progress in the capital came at the meeting of the Grand Lodge of Scotland on January 13, 1787, when the Grand Master gave the toast, ‘Caledonia, and Caledonia’s Bard, brother Burns!’ It is idle to conjecture if the coolness which followed his first acclaim in Edinburgh reached into Masonic circles; certainly the poet’s interest in the craft waned in his later years. His letters from Ellisland and Dumfries scarcely mention it, except when he was in trouble and wanted Robert Graham to help him as a Mason as well as a friend. He duly affiliated himself with the Dumfries lodge, and became its Senior Warden, but if silence means anything the zest was gone.