On my first trip to Scotland I made loving pilgrimages to the shrines of Robert Burns and Walter Scott. Returning to America, I voiced my love for these great Scottish writers in almost every town and city from New York to San Francisco; in open-air assemblies, by the side of clear lakes and bright-flowing rivers, from Minnesota to Florida; and I have brought them back to the old Homestead, to the lecture platforms of Ayr, Edinburgh, Glasgow, Kilmarnock, and Stirling, "nane the waur," I trust, for their long journeying.

BOUT two miles from the burgh of Ayr, on the great road leading from its main street to the

There

"Auld Brig o' Doon," stands a cottage, clay-built and white-washed, with a thatched roof almost touching the lintel of the doorway. are many of these plain, one-storey dwellings scattered over Scotland from Gretna Green to John o' Groat's, all having a family resemblance of poverty, but few plainer than this, which bears on the left

hand door-post a little sign-board

with these words :

ROBERT BURNS,

THE AYRSHIRE POET,

was born under this roof on the

25th of January 1759. Died the 21st of July 1796.

One hundred and thirty-five years ago the father of the poet built this house with his own hands, little thinking that his rude masonry would become a temple of the muses; and, surely, the stately lords and nobles of Carrick and Kyle and Cunningham ancient families dwelling in the castles of their ancestors -would have smiled had it been foretold to them that this humble shelter would be the shrine of their nation, and a spot known and loved

by the world; that, when they were in their graves, and their rank and their titles forgotten, it would be the central point of interest in a national, or, if I may so call it, an international celebration - the centennial of the great genius of their country; more than this, that Scotland, the northern land of poetry and the nurse of arms, -than which no nation has a truer romance, a sweeter poetry, or a brighter history, both in civil and in religious liberty,-should be rebaptised in the light of that genius, radiating from that little cottage, until she should be known the world over as the "Land of Burns.”

A whole people delight in this homage, and many are the testimonials to his memory: monuments and statues in street, garden, and art

building; the careful guardianship of everything his hand has touched; translations of his songs into so many different languages, and, flowing from still deeper veneration, personal tributes which indicate more clearly the place he occupies in the heart of mankind.

Scarcely a day passes without bringing some token of affection ; and, when I met one summer evening in 1870, on the banks of the Doon, a gentleman from San Francisco, who had received from the hands of the ladies of that city a wreath of flowers to place upon his grave, I felt more than ever before how universal was the love for the peasant poet, and a certain pride that, humble as it was, it was not only an offering from my own