old landlord or his factor, that they
stocked the new farm. The change was a beneficial one for all the
family, who were now for the first time in their lives provided with a
comfortable dwelling; and everything considered, especially so for their
head,--which Robert, who was now in his twenty-sixth year, virtually
became. He realized the gravity of the responsibility which rested upon
him, and rightly judging that industry alone would not enable him to
support it, resolved to work with the brains of others as well as his
own hard hands. He read farming books, he calculated crops, he attended
markets, but all to no purpose; for like his father before him, however
much he may have deserved success, he could not command it. What he
could and did command however was the admiration of his fellows, who
were quick to perceive and ready to acknowledge his superiority. There
was that about him which impressed them,--something in his temperament
or talent, in his personality or character, which removed him from the
roll of common men. What seemed to distinguish him most was the charm of
his conversation, which, remarkable as it was for fluency and force, for
originality and brilliancy, was quite as remarkable for good sense and
good feeling. Grave or gay, as the occasion suggested and the spirit
moved him, he spoke as with authority and was listened to with rapt
attention. His company was sought, and go where he would he was
everywhere welcomed as a good fellow. He had the art of making friends;
and though they were not always of the kind that his well-wishers could
have desired, they were the best of their kind in and about Mauchline.
What he saw in some of them, other than the pleasure they felt in his
society, it is hard to say; but whatever it was, he liked it and the
conviviality to which it led,--which, occasionally coarsened by stories
that set the table in a roar, was ever and anon refined by songs that
filled his eyes with tears. His life was a hard one,--a succession of
dull, monotonous, laborious days, haunted by anxiety and harassed by
petty, irritating cares,--but he faced it cheerfully, manfully, and
wrestled with it triumphantly, for he compelled it to forge the weapons
with which he conquered it. He sang like a boy at Lochlea; he wrote like
a man at Mossgiel. The first poetical note that he struck there was a
personal one, and commemorative of his regard for two rustic rhymers,
David Sillar and John Lapraik, to wh