ONE day when the poet was at the pretty watering-place of Moffat, two ladies rode past – one tall and portly, and the other, “the bonnie wee thing” of his muse.
A friend asked him why God had made Miss Davies so little while her companion was so large, and he at once produced the epigram –
“Ask why God made the gem so small,
An’ why so huge the granite;
Because God meant mankind should set
The higher value on it.”
This impromptu was afterwards written by the poet on a window pane of the Black Bull Inn at Moffat, but the piece of glass which it emblazoned has long since disappeared.