place in the church of Auchinleck." Though the vault is now at a little distance from the church, yet in the old building, which did not occupy precisely the same site, it was under a room at the back of the Boswells' pew. On a wall in the churchyard I noticed a curiously-carved stone with the following inscription:
M
G.W.
1621
M. G.
POSUIT DILECTA MARITO.
QUEMQUE VIRO POSUIT
DESTINAT HORA SIBI.
THIS STONE WAS ERECTED
1621
IN MEMORY OF THE
REVD. GEORGE WALKER
WHO WAS PASTOR OF THIS PARISH.
REPAIRED BY OLD MORTALITY
IN HIS DAY
AND RENEWED AND PLACED HERE IN
1855.
"Auchinleck," said the landlady of my inn, "is the very heart of the Covenanters' district." Hard by, at Airdsmoss, the founder of the Cameronians, with seven or eight of his followers, was slain in July, 1681. In the churchyard lies buried a man of a very different type of character—William Murdoch, the inventor of gas. Two of Boswell's tenants were James and William Murdoch. They and their forefathers had possessed their farms for many generations.[1] Perhaps not only the Life of Boswell, but illumination by gas takes its rise from Auchinleck.
The village consists mainly of one long street of solidly-built stone houses; the older ones thatched and often white-washed, the modern ones slated. At the back are good gardens well stocked with fruit trees. Bare feet are far more common here than in the Highlands or Hebrides. All the children, with scarcely an exception, and many of the women, go bare-footed. As I passed down the street a "roup," or sale by auction, was going on before the house of a deceased "baker, violin-maker, clock-mender, blood-letter, dentist, geologist, and collector of coins." The auctioneer, standing on the doorstep of this departed worthy, who at one and
- ↑ See Boswell's will in Rogers's Boswelliana, p. 185.
