But no realization of the trouble Nicol was helping to make, no recognition of the schoolmaster’s real character, affected Burns. He continued, after he left the city, to correspond with Nicol; when the obstinate son of Latin Prose got into the row which finally led to his resignation from the High School, Burns championed him against his amiable principal, Dr. Alexander Adam. By christening one of his sons William Nicol, Burns proclaimed his friendship to the world at large, and during the years at Ellisland performed such services as getting appraisals of a farm Nicol was buying, and maintaining a broken-down mare which a horse-coper had passed off on the schoolmaster. The friendship lasted until February, 1793, when Burns was suffering from the rage and humiliation which followed the official inquiry into his revolutionary sympathies. Some report of the matter having reached Nicol, he undertook to rebuke Burns in a would-be facetious vein. The poet was in no mood for rebuke or good advice, facetious or not, and with his heavily satirical reply to Nicol their correspondence ended--too late. In any case Edinburgh friendships, good or bad, however much he might try to maintain them by correspondence, could not supply companionship when Burns moved to Ellisland. Though on his first visit to Dumfries he had professed himself enchanted with the company he met, he was lonely enough when he actually settled there. He made acquaintances, no doubt ‘men of talent and humour’, among the tradesfolk and professional men of the town, but people like Dr. James Mundell, Walter Auld the saddler, Henry Clint of the King’s Arms, William Hyslop of the Globe Inn, and Thomas Boyd, the contractor who built Ellisland, are names and little more. Apart from his landlord, Patrick Miller, with whom his relations were soon strained, the most congenial friend he had during the three years on the farm was Robert Riddell of Glenriddell, whose estate of Friars Carse marched with Ellisland.