We went to every spot near Ayr, made illustrious by the name of Burns--Bonny Doon, Kilmarnock, Ellisland, everywhere, and held in our hands the very Bible the poet gave to Highland Mary as they bade farewell forever, standing with hands clasped across a little brook. Our friend and guide was Mr. McKee, the old Burns scholar and historian, who in his youth had known many of Burns’ friends. He is a last link with the poet’s day. He gave me a souvenir, his own book on Burns. I have kept it with one given me later at Edinburgh by a friend of Walter Scott, who had been an apprentice in the printing house where Walter Scott was a member. As a messenger for the poet, he carried his manuscripts from Abbotsford to Edinburgh, and the money for them back to Scott. He wrote his name in an early edition of “Marmion,” and gave it to us. [Illustration: St. Gall.--_Page 306._] _St. Gall, Switzerland, May Day, 1891._--The Consulate and our home is at 41 Museum Strasse. The duties here are five times what they were at Rome. The district sends forty million francs worth of laces and embroideries to New York in a single year, and a hundred million francs worth of goods are sent from the country at large. These are all invoiced and samples examined at the consulates, while to avoid frauds, copies of the sworn invoices are sent to the shipper, to the Custom House, and to the Treasury. There is not another city situated like St. Gall in all the world. It has 40,000 people, and they live like a little kingdom to themselves, up here among the Alps. The customs of the people differ from everything else in Switzerland. The families are as clannish as the old Scots, and their ways of doing things almost as old as their mountains. This land of St. Gall was once a Republic by itself, like Venice. Its history is half forgotten. Napoleon put an end to it after it had endured five hundred years. It was modeled on the plan of some of the Greek states. Its founders had been readers of history, not politicians trying experiments. They had a good chance to govern wholly for themselves, and to be let alone. They were isolated in the heart of the beautiful Alps, and their valleys were three or four thousand feet above sea level. Mountain scenery of the finest description surrounded them everywhere, just as it does the land of their children to-day. A thousand feet below them, lay a beautiful and historic lake. They had Burgomasters for Presidents, and it was purely a people’s government. Its type exists in neighboring Appenzell even to-day. There the parliament meets in meadows, and the people pass laws by the showing of hands.