Describes, illustrates and collates two manuscripts, in the National Library of Scotland and in the G. Ross Roy Collection at the University of South Carolina, of "The Answer," Burns's autobiographical verse-letter of March 1787 written in response to one he had received from Elizabeth Scot (1729-1789), of Wauchope. Neither manuscript was known or available to Kinsley for his Clarendon edition (1968), and neither corresponds exactly to either of the two posthumous printed texts on which Kinsley and other editors have had to rely. One intriguing variant, present in the NLS manuscript but nowhere else, suggests that Burns misjudged Scot's social status when he drafted his response, perhaps explaining why he never published a poem of considerable verve and biographical significance. Attachment is unpaged prepublication version.