I was defending Allison in that libel case and we started off on the 200-mile trip together. We had the smoker of the Pullman all to ourselves, and after I had recited some furlongs of Burns to him, he began to sing "Jockey's Ta'en the Parting Kiss" in a sort of thin and whimpering quaver of a tenor that cut through the noise of the train like a violin note through silence. I thought I knew the poem, but it seemed to me I had never dreamed what was in it, with the wail of a Highland woman pouring plaintive melody through the flood gates of her heart. And he knew every one of them and sang them all with the tailing of the bag-pipes in the sound. I wasn't going down to practice law, but to practice patience and politics. I had been on that circuit for years and knew the court and the bar very well. So I said to Allison "Don't you sing one of those songs again until I give the sign." And the first thing I did was to bring him into touch with the circuit judge, who had the room adjoining mine at the hotel. He was a Burns lover, too; and besides as I had brought whiskey and as the town was prohibition, there was really nowhere else for the judge to spend his evenings. Soon we were capping back and forth, the judge and I, with Burns. I don't remember now--nobody ever remembers, after a cold, snowy night outside, between Burns quotations, hot whiskies, and reminiscences, exactly how anything happens--but about 10 o'clock, maybe, Allison was somewhere between "Jockey's Ta'en the Parting Kiss," "Bonnie Doon," "Afton Water" and "Wert Thou in the Cauld Blast," and the judge and I were looking deep into the coals of the grate and crying softly and unconsciously together. You see it wasn't only the songs. Every damned one of us was Scotch-Irish and we just sat there and were transported back to the beginning of ourselves in the bare old primitive homes of us in farm and village, saw the log and coal fires of infancy blazing up again, and heard the voices of our mothers crooning and caressing those marvelous lines, and behind them _their_ mothers crooning and wailing the same back in the unbroken line to Ayrshire and the Pentland Hills. And all life was just a look into yesterday and the troubles and the struggles of manhood fell right off as garments and left us boys again. That's what's in Burns, the singing poet. That is, when anybody knows how to sing him--not concert singers with artfulness, but just a singer with the right quaver and the whine of catgut in the voice and the tailing of Scotch pipes for the swells. It was perhaps two o'clock of the morning when we stood up, said "Little Willie's Prayer" softly together, arms on shoulders, and the judge remarked: "Allison, if you wrote like you sing Burns, maybe you wouldn't be here--but it's well worth the trouble!"