Always following in the track of Burns, the Gray Dragon dashed up and down short, steep, switchbacked hills (which must have tried any steed of ancient days except a witch's broomstick) and whisked us into Sanquhar, the "sean cathair" or "old fortress" of earliest Gaelic times, now snappily called "Sanker." There Queen Mary rested, going to Dundrennan after the terrible battle of Langside; there Prince Charlie marched; and there was a monument of granite to the Covenanters Cameron and Renwick. Burns must have dreamed of Queen Mary when duty brought him to Sanquhar; and Renwick would have been a person to appeal to him, because of his youth and good looks, and because the "pretty lad" was the last martyr to the Covenant. But perhaps he thought most of all of that Admirable Crichton who was born at Sanquhar, not in the castle of his wild and brilliant family, but at Eliock House. Burns would maybe have liked him not so much for taking his degree at St. Andrews when he was twelve, or for knowing ten languages and many sciences, as for wandering adventurously over the world, winning tilting matches at the Louvre, and the love of ladies at Padua and Venice.
Mrs. James had bought a book with quotations from a diary of Burns, and she read out to us while the car stopped at Sanquhar what he had written about one specimen day:
"Left Thornhill at five in the morning. Rode four miles to Enterkinfoot and made a call: thence three miles to Slunkerford with another call: thence six miles to Sanquhar, where there were twenty official visits to be made: thence two miles to Whitehall, with two more calls: and a return journey to Sanquhar, finishing the day's work at seven in the evening."
Poor poet. But he had always his glowing fancies to keep his heart warm. We felt almost guilty because we had no horrid calls to make, as he had; nothing to do but enjoy the scene made magical by his love of it: the valley with its near green hills and distant peaks of Galloway and Lowther; the river girdling wooded reaches with a belt of silver, or burrowing through deep rocky channels, purple as heather petrified. It was all as different from yesterday's Crockettland as if we had crossed the ocean from one to the other.