Robert Burns dismounts stiffly from his horse on a dreich Winter's evening, having ridden forty miles through the muddy roads and lanes of Dumfriesshire, and pulls off his boots and sodden top-coat to sit wearily by the fire. Whilst Jean sets before him a bowl of broth, he reaches for a sheet or two of ruled Excise paper and writes a few lines he has been running over in his head for the last hour or so, testing them against the Scots air he wishes to provide with a set of words. Although of his own composition, he feels that they are closer in spirit to the songs of his compeers, the Common People, than the polite words set to that air three-quarters of a century ago by one of Allan Ramsay's "ingenious young gentlemen" in contributing to "The Tea-Table Miscellany" of the 1720s. These words have been sung by other polite ladies and gentlemen gathered around harpsichords in their Palladian villas, built by the Adam family, since their first publication, and he's also heard them sung at country weddings by friends and neighbours in Ayrshire, Edinburgh and Dumfries. After all, he found them first in "The Lark", a cheap collection of words (only) which he pored over incessantly as a youth; neither he nor anyone of his own "order" - the tillers of the land, not the owners - had ever been able to afford a collection printed with both words and musical scores. Not, that is, until James Johnson began publishing "The Scots Musical Museum", with notes struck cheaply on pewter plates rather than engraved, at great expense (everyone recognises how skilled a trade engraving is) on large copperplates. Since 1787, he has been contributing both his knowledge of Scots music, and his unrivalled skill in wedding words to a melody, to this publication; already he has made upwards of two hundred songs, sometimes adapting a line or two he found in David Herd's manuscripts (consulted when in Edinburgh) as well as in Herd's own two volumes of Ancient and Modern Scotish Songs, Heroic Ballads and Pastorals. He is startled out of what he sometimes calls a "poetic reverie" by Jean, who hands him a package from Edinburgh; opening it, he finds the most magnificent quarto edition of music he has ever seen. George Thomson - a violinist, and Chief Clerk to the Government's Trustees' Academy in Edinburgh - has at last published his "Select Collection of Original Scotish Airs", complete with accompaniments by Continental composers, all arranged for the new-farrant Pianoforte and the German Flute, with "opening and concluding symphonies", no less. When approached to provide some new verses, such as might be sung by ladies and gentlemen, Burns had readily agreed, stating only that he would not accept any payment; the common people, after all, had made songs for themselves "time out of mind" without thought of anything other than the love of their music and the approval of their neighbours, and he had done the same for Johnson's publication without thought of payment; even if the ordinary, down-to-earth Johnson could have afforded it, to take money for making songs would be (he grinned as he reflected on his words to Thomson) "downright sodomy of soul". At that very moment, a small sheet of paper fluttered from the pages; a Banker's Draft for £5; the price of one of Thomson's splendid volumes. A few curses followed, and the reflection that one more possession of the Common People was being appropriated by "People of Condition", who thought that everything had a price, or, at least, everything they thought worthy of taking. No doubt, in years to come, a few readers would look back on the effigy of an age, the few, "select" songs that the Polite deemed worthy of performance and publication, while the outwardly unimpressive publications of Herd, and Johnson, and that aggressive wee fellow Ritson from England, would be overlooked or forgotten. Perhaps some scholars would argue over such things as "authenticity" but - and here he sighed - no doubt, in the Imperial state that Britain had become, they would probably confine their arguments to the collecting activities of some gentlemen from England who would, maybe even a century after his own work, take an interest in the field. He lifted his fiddle from the wall and roughly picked out the notes of another air he remembered from childhood....