Even the mutilated letters which survive show that Burns freely confided his past and present peccadillos to Ainslie; the sequel proves the confidence to have been ill bestowed. At the end of the Border tour, for instance, Burns found awaiting him in Dumfries post-office a letter from Meg Cameron, an Edinburgh servant girl who was to bear a child which she claimed was his. Ainslie was commissioned to ‘send for the wench and give her ten or twelve shillings’ against the poet’s return to the city. In reply, Ainslie broke the news that he had himself just become the father of an illegitimate son, and received from his friend a roaring welcome to ‘the venerable Society of Fathers’. Again in the following year Burns favored Ainslie with a highly-coloured account of his final reconciliation with Jean Armour, and early in 1789 instructed his young friend to locate Jenny Clow so that Burns, on his arrival in Edinburgh, could settle the suit Jenny had brought against him. More creditable matters also occupied the correspondence. Some of Burns’s earliest doubts about Ellisland, some of his deepest gloom about his own and his family’s future, were told to Ainslie. But the friendship died before Burns did, and through Ainslie’s fault. On Friday, October 15, 1790, Ainslie came to Ellisland for the week-end. On Monday he reported the visit to Agnes M’Lehose, with whom he was by this time on confidential, and even flirtatious, terms. The warmth of Burns’s welcome was gratifying, but the house, he noted, was ‘ill contrived--and pretty Dirty, and _Hugry Mugry_’, and its other inmates pleased him little. Jean was ‘Vulgar & Common-place in a considerable degree--and pretty round & fat’, but ‘a kind Body in her Own way, and the husband Tolerably Attentive to her’. Also present were Burns’s sister and sister-in-law--‘common looking girls’--and ‘3 Male and female cousins’ who had been helping with the harvest. Burns rejoiced that his friend had arrived ‘upon his _Kirn_ night, when he Expected some of his friends to help make merry’, but sight of the guests deepened Ainslie’s depression, for they were ‘a Vulgar looking Tavern keeper from Dumfries; and his Wife more Vulgar--Mr. Miller of Dalswinton’s Gardener and his Wife--and said Wife’s sister--and a little fellow from Dumfries, who had been a Clerk’. Burns and the rest had a good time, ‘Dancing, and Kissing the Lasses at the End of every dance’, while Ainslie shuddered to the depths of his paltry little soul. Burns the peasant was enjoying himself in the world of his birth, and the young snob from Edinburgh couldn’t understand him at all: