rm; and he describes the life as "the
cheerless gloom of a hermit, and the unceasing moil of a galley slave." In
1784 the father, after a lifetime of toil, was saved from a debtor's prison
by consumption and death. To rescue something from the wreck of the home,
and to win a poor chance of bread for the family, the two older boys set up
a claim for arrears of wages that had never been paid. With the small sum
allowed them, they buried their father, took another farm, Mossgiel, in
Mauchline, and began again the long struggle with poverty.

Such, in outline, is Burns's own story of his early life, taken mostly from
his letters. There is another and more pleasing side to the picture, of
which we have glimpses in his poems and in his Common-place Book. Here we
see the boy at school; for like most Scotch peasants, the father gave his
boys the best education he possibly could. We see him following the plow,
not like a slave, but like a free man, crooning over an old Scotch song and
making a better one to match the melody. We see him stop the plow to listen
to what the wind is saying, or turn aside lest he disturb the birds at
their singing and nest making. At supper we see the family about the table,
happy notwithstanding their scant fare, each child with a spoon in one hand
and a book in the other. We hear Betty Davidson reciting, from her great
store, some heroic ballad that fired the young hearts to enthusiasm and
made them forget the day's toil. And in "The Cotter's Saturday Night" we
have a glimpse of Scotch peasant life that makes us almost reverence these
heroic men and women, who kept their faith and their self-respect in the
face of poverty, and whose hearts, under their rough exteriors, were tender
and true as steel.

A most unfortunate change in Burns's life began when he left the farm, at
seventeen, and went to Kirkoswald to study surveying. The town was the
haunt of smugglers, rough-living, hard-drinking men; and Burns speedily
found his way into those scenes of "riot and roaring dissipation" which
were his bane ever afterwards. For a little while he studied diligently,
but one day, while taking the altitude of the sun, he saw a pretty girl in
the neighboring garden, and love put trigonometry to flight. Soon he gave
up his work and wandered back to the farm and poverty again.

When twenty-seven years of age Burns first attracted literary attention,
and in the same moment sprang to the first place in Scottish lett