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It had been told me that he ranked among his friends and associates many of the highest names in the kingdom, and yet to-night not one of the hundreds who fluttered past appeared inclined to recognise him. He seemed too but perhaps fancy misled me as if care-worn and dejected; pained, perhaps, that not one among so many of the great should have humility enough to notice a poor exciseman.
This was an age of pensions, but not a farthing of pension did he ever get. He was made an exciseman or gauger, at a salary of £50 a year, and he followed that occupation for the few remaining years of his life. Robert Burns wrote and did some things unworthy of a great poet; but when Scotland thinks of him, she quotes the lines which he wrote for Tam Samson's Elegy:
When the Federal exciseman came among this border people and sought to levy tribute, they blackened or otherwise disguised themselves and treated him to a coat of tar and feathers, at the same time threatening to burn his house. He resigned.
Bardell, who had been knocked on the head with a quart-pot in a public-house cellar, the learned serjeant's voice faltered, and he proceeded, with emotion 'Some time before his death, he had stamped his likeness upon a little boy. With this little boy, the only pledge of her departed exciseman, Mrs.
Sandy Bruce, retired school-teacher himself, superintendent of the hospital in Charlottetown, road-master, ship-owner, exciseman, Sandy Bruce, whose sharp and unexpected questions had been known to floor the best of scholars and upset the plans of the best of teachers.
What I have, therefore, chiefly to record as the memorables of this year, are things of small import the main of which are, that some of the neighbouring lairds, taking example by Mr Kibbock, my father-in-law that was, began in this fall to plant the tops of their hills with mounts of fir-trees; and Mungo Argyle, the exciseman, just herried the poor smugglers to death, and made a power of prize-money, which, however, had not the wonted effect of riches, for it brought him no honour; and he lived in the parish like a leper, or any other kind of excommunicated person.
The fellow at the door was an exciseman a race everywhere detested and with good cause, for besides the insolence of their manners nothing makes a man feel more like a slave than the inquisitorial search they are accustomed to make through one's clothes and most secret possessions.
By and by we came to the Nith, which afterward we did not leave; and through a green glen wound the "sweet Afton" Burns wrote of and loved almost as dearly as he loved its elder brother. Here in this valley, companioned with his own starry thoughts, he walked and rode, happy in his fellowship with Nature, even though poverty made him an exciseman at fifty pounds a year.
And the thought of this old exciseman, who once lipped and fingered on his pipe and uttered clear notes from it in the mountain air, and the words of the song he affected, carry your mind 'Over the hills and far away' to distant countries; and you have a vision of Edinburgh not, as you see her, in the midst of a little neighbourhood, but as a boss upon the round world with all Europe and the deep sea for her surroundings.
He takes over the certificate which does not show brandy, signs it, and the transaction is complete. Everything is in order, and he has got four kegs smuggled in." "Good," Willis interjected. "On the other hand, suppose the one o'clock trip is held up by an exciseman. This time Fox produces the other certificate, the one which shows the brandy.
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