---
title: "To Mr. Samuel Brown"
author: "Robert Burns"
recipient: "Mr. Samuel Brown"
letter_number: 160
roman: "CLX"
date: "4 May 1789"
place: "Mossgiel"
source: "Project Gutenberg #18500 — The Complete Works of Robert Burns (ed. Allan Cunningham)"
editor: "Allan Cunningham"
source_url: "https://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/18500/pg18500.txt"
canonical_url: "https://robert-burns.com/letters/160-to-samuel-brown/"
---

# To Mr. Samuel Brown

## Editor's note
Samuel Brown was brother to the poet's mother: he seems to have been a joyous sort of person, who loved a joke, and understood double meanings.

— Allan Cunningham

## Letter
DEAR UNCLE,

This, I hope, will find you and your conjugal yoke-fellow in your good old way; I am impatient to know if the Ailsa fowling be commenced for this season yet, as I want three or four stones of feathers, and I hope you will bespeak them for me. It would be a vain attempt for me to enumerate the various transactions I have been engaged in since I saw you last, but this know,—I am engaged in a _smuggling trade_, and God knows if ever any poor man experienced better returns, two for one, but as freight and delivery have turned out so dear, I am thinking of taking out a license and beginning in fair trade. I have taken a farm on the borders of the Nith, and in imitation of the old Patriarchs, get men-servants and maid-servants, and flocks and herds, and beget sons and daughters.

Your obedient nephew,

R. B.

---

Source: [Project Gutenberg #18500 — The Complete Works of Robert Burns (ed. Allan Cunningham)](https://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/18500/pg18500.txt), edited by Allan Cunningham  
Canonical HTML: https://robert-burns.com/letters/160-to-samuel-brown/