has quite passed away-a picture which most of us have probably never seen the merry band of reapers, all animated by a healthy rivalry ("kempin'" it was called), each one doing his or her best for the pure love of the thing, and led on by the "stibble rig," who was the foremost reaper. The lines in "Hallowe'en" will recur

to you:-
:-

"Our stibble rig was Rab M'Graen,

A clever, sturdy fallow."

There is little or no likelihood of the love passion being stirred in the harvest field in the twentieth century -the self-binder has destroyed the romance of harvesting.

In the eighteenth century, and indeed up till nearly our own times, the ingathering of the harvest was celebrated by a " Kirn,” which was a social meeting of the farmer and his household. Burns has several allusions to those joyous gatherings. Thus, in "The Twa Dogs," Luath, in telling his friend Cæsar that "poor folk's no sae wretched's ane wad think," points to the kirn as one of the occasions of happiness among the peasantry. It is to be regretted that Burns, who was such a master at painting the manners and customs of the people did not give us a description of a kirn, with which he was so familiar. He must have been present at many a one in his own father's house, and we know, on the authority of Robert Ainslie, his Edinburgh friend, that when he went to his farm at Ellisland he did not forget to entertain his household in this way. Ainslie visited him at such a time, and in a letter to Mrs M'Lehose he wrote "We spent the evening in the way common on such occasions of dancing, and kissing the lassies at the end of every dance "-doubtless a very agreeable way to Ainslie, who was about as fond of "the as the Poet himself. There was, of course, plenty to eat

sex

and plenty to drink.

"That merry night we get the corn in,
O sweetly then thou reams the horn in,"

says Burns, in his eulogy of "Scotch drink," a
which I shall have something to say later on.

beverage about

With so much

dancing the fiddler was indispensable, and the "pigmy scraper," one of the "Jolly Beggars," sings :

"At kirns and weddings we'se be there,

And oh! sae nicely's we will fare;

We'll bouse about till Daddy Care

The grain, having been gathered into the stackyard, was laboriously threshed with the flail, a huge kind of whip used by the hand, with a wooden batten for lash hinged on to the handle, still to be found in some of the remote parts of Scotland. It is the flail which Burns means when he refers to "the thresher's weary flinging tree;" but though the work was tiresome he was proud to be able to perform it. To quote again from the " Epistle to the Guidwife of Wauchope House":

"I mind it weel in early date,

When I was beardless, young, and blate,
And first could thresh the barn,"

Or haud a yokin' at the pleugh,

And though forfoughten sair eneugh
Yet unco proud to learn."

It was with the flail that poor "John Barleycorn
belaboured:
:-

The threshing mill, with which experiments had been made before Burns became a farmer, was brought to a state of perfection in 1787, though the Poet does not appear to have used it either at Mossgiel or at Ellisland. Another implement which had been invented before his time, and which he made no use of, was fanners, which was much more effective for separating the corn from the chaff than the old process of winnowing. The corn was thrown into the air on the winnowing hill, or "shealing law," and the wind carried away the chaff, the operation being repeated till the corn was clean. So it happened with "John Barleycorn after he had been cudgelled full sore that

The grain was thrown into the air with a “wecht," a thing like a huge tambourine, to which we have a reference in "Hallowe'en ":—

66

'Meg fain wad to the barn gane

To win three wechts o' naething."

But winnowing was not a perfect process, and so

"The cleanest corn that e'er was dight

May hae some piles o' caff in."

It is amusing, by the way, at this date to look back upon the opposition which was aroused by the introduction of the fanners, which, the pious declared, was a way of raising the devil's wind. One remembers the indignation of Mause Headrigg at Cuddie Headrigg's working in the barn "wi' a newfangled machine for dightin' the corn frae the chaff, thus impiously thwarting the will o' Divine Providence."

In some old barns are still to be seen two doors, placed in a straight line on opposite sides of the building, for the purpose of creating a draught of air when open. The winnowers stood in this draught with the "wechts" and tossed the grain upwards, the full ears falling to the floor, while the husks were blown into the adjacent "caff" house, or at least in its direction.

In the early part of the eighteenth century the grinding of the corn was done under a system which entailed great hardship on the farmer, whose land was "thirled" to a particular mill, to which every particle of the grain, except what was reserved for seed, had to be sent. The miller exacted heavy dues in kind, and if the farmer sold his grain before it was ground he was subjected to prosecution for depriving the miller of his rights. This system had happily ceased to exist in most parts of the country at the time Burns wrote, and Ayrshire was tolerably free from it, if we may judge by the experience of Tam o' Shanter, who, instead of regarding the miller as one of his natural enemies, ranked him, along with the Souter of Ayr, as an "ancient, trusty, drouthy crony."

"Ilka melder wi' the miller,

Thou sat as lang as thou had siller,"

was the charge, doubtless well founded, brought against the

tenant of Shanter farm by his afflicted helpmate.

In earlier days the journeyings to the mill-whether to leave the grain or to take away the meal-was a duty unwillingly performed; but in the closing years of the century better times had come for both the farmer and the miller, who, in true Scottish fashion, celebrated their prosperity and growing friendship by drinking drams. 'Thirling," though still legally binding in some places, has fallen into desuetude, and is now very seldom insisted on.

But let us turn now to another phase of the subject. I mean spinning and weaving. There is a well-known verse in the "Epistle to J. Lapraik":

"On Fasteneen we had a rockin,'

To ca' the crack and weave our stockin' ;

And there was muckle fun and jokin',
Ye need na doubt;

At length we had a hearty yokin',
At sang about."

دو

The word "rockin' really takes us back to a time prior to Burns. In those early days the refined flax or tow, as the Scotchcalled it, was spun on the distaff or rock, which was a very portable instrument, and women calling on their neighbours were in the habit of taking their rocks with them, so that they might spin as well as talk, and spend the time profitably. The lads, of course, went where the lassies were, and carried their rocks, pretty much, I suppose, as the young men carry the umbrellas of the girls now a days. This was called going a-rockin', and when the distaff gave place to the spinning-wheel, and such gatherings became for the most part simply social, the name was retained. Thus it was in the days of Burns. But the spinning-wheel, though it was an unwieldy article, was sometimes carried to such a meeting. Witness the song "Duncan Davison" :

"There was a lass, they ca'd her Meg,
And she held o'er the moors to spin;
There was a lad that followed her,
They ca'd him Duncan Davison.

The moor was dreigh, and Meg was skeigh,
Her favour Duncan couldna win;

For wi' the rock she wad him knock,

And aye she took the temper pin.

As o'er the moor they lightly foor,
A burn was clear, a glen was green,
Upon the banks they eas'd their shanks,
And aye she set the wheel between ;
But Duncan swoor a haly aith

That Meg should be a bride the morn,
Then Meg took up her spinnin' graith,

And flang them a' out o'er the burn."

The flax spun by the women was commonly known as lint, which was widely grown in Scotland in the eighteenth century, though it is rarely that one comes across a field of it in this country in these days, the supply for the linen mills being imported. When, therefore, Burns addressed a song to the "Lassie wi' the lint white locks," and the mother, in "The Cottar's Saturday Night," informed the bashful youth who had come to convoy Jenny hame that her "weel hained kebbuck was "a towmond auld sin' lint was in the bell," he was using figurative language that everybody could understand, but the meaning of which we of the twentieth century will fail to grasp if we know nothing about flax-growing in the time of Burns. The process of teasing or refining flax was called "heckling "-a word used now, I fear, only at election meetings-which was a common trade throughout the country. Burns, it will be remembered, was a heckler in Irvine for some time. An oblong board with small steel spikes or stiff wires inserted, giving it the appearance of a huge clothes brush, known as a heckle, was used for this purpose, and tinklers found employment in putting new spikes into the frames when the old ones had worn out or were damaged. Without this explanation the meaning of Burns's song, "Merry hae I been teething a heckle," may be obscure :

The manufacture of flax into tow, from which the thread was spun, is illustrated by one of the humorous songs of Burns, and it may be quoted in full :