Situated on one of the two roads from Carlisle to Edinburgh, Moffat had of old-time a goodly number of inns. Among them the “Annandale Arms” and the “Spur” were immediate competitors. There are Burns associations with the “Spur,” but much more intimate ones with the “Old Black Bull” inn, which remains very much the same plain whitewashed stone house it was in the poet’s day. The tale is told how he, with some cronies, was drinking in a window-seat of the inn when they saw two ladies ride by on horseback; one of them so pretty and so small that she was known as “one of the Graces in miniature.” “Odd,” said one of the public-house loungers, “that one should be so little and the other so big”; whereupon Burns wrote on a window-pane: Ask why God made the gem so small, And why so huge the granite? Because God meant mankind should set The greater value on it. A very pretty compliment to the little lady, but uncommonly hard, by implication, on the full-sized one. The pane of glass was long ago removed, and is supposed to be now at Dumfries. The famed Sulphur Well is situated a mile and a half away from Moffat, in a Swiss-like châlet on a rugged hillside 300 feet above the town. Some walk to it, others ride, and for two-pence you can drink as much of the almost incredibly nasty water as you please. The first tumbler is, to taste and smell (it smells like “election eggs” or assafœtida), more than enough for the strongest stomach, and seems to be brewed in an inner laboratory of the infernal regions. But the second glass—if you are ill enough or courageous enough to take a second—seems not so bad, and visitors by degrees become perfect gluttons for it. The water is a specific for rheumatism and gout, among other things, and was known so long ago as 1633, when Rachel Whiteford, daughter of the parson of Moffat, benefited by it. In 1659, Dr. Matthew McKaile, of Edinburgh, wrote a pamphlet in Latin about its virtues, and thereafter the fame of the Well has taken care of itself. But the invigorating air of the mountains has, no doubt, at least an equal share in restoring many of the invalids to health. The rugged and forbidding scenery around Moffat culminates on the Edinburgh Road at the gloomy hollow of the hills called the “Devil’s Beef Tub,” which is said to have acquired its name from this being a favourite place among the cattle-thieves of yore to hide their stolen cattle. The “Beef Tub” is really a deeper and more rugged version of the “Devil’s Punch Bowl” on the Portsmouth Road. Sir Walter Scott, who romantically says “It looks as if four hills were laying their heads together to shut daylight from the dark, hollow space between them,” tells in “Redgauntlet” how a prisoner being marched past the spot, breaking from his guards, escaped by throwing himself down and _rolling_ to the bottom. [Sidenote: _TRAGEDY OF THE SNOW_]