old to be the first of human
joys, our dearest blessing here below! How she caught the contagion I
cannot tell; you medical people talk much of infection from breathing
the same air, the touch, etc., but I never expressly said I loved her.
Indeed I did not know myself why I liked so much to loiter behind with
her when returning in the evening from our labours; why the tones of
her voice made my heartstrings thrill like an Aeolian harp; and
particularly why my pulse beat such a furious ratan, when I looked and
fingered over her little hand to pick out the cruel nettle-stings and
thistles. Among her other love-inspiring qualities, she sung sweetly;
and it was her favourite reel to which I attempted giving an embodied
vehicle in rhyme. I was not so presumptuous as to imagine that I could
make verses like printed ones, composed by men who had Greek and Latin;
but my girl sung a song which was said to be composed by a small
country laird's son, on one of his father's maids with whom he was in
love; and I saw no reason why I might not rhyme as well as he; for,
excepting that he could smear sheep, and cast peats, his father living
in the moorlands, he had no more scholar-craft than myself.

Thus with me began love and poetry, which at times have been my only,
and till within the last twelve months have been my highest, enjoyment.
My father struggled on till he reached the freedom in his lease, when
he entered on a larger farm, about ten miles farther in the country.
The nature of the bargain he made was such as to throw a little ready
money into his hands at the commencement of his lease, otherwise the
affair would have been impracticable. For four years we lived
comfortably here, but a difference commencing between him and his
landlord as to terms, after three years' tossing and whirling in the
vortex of litigation, my father was just saved from the horrors of a
jail by a consumption which, after two years' promises, kindly stepped
in, and carried him away, to where the wicked cease from troubling, and
where the weary are at rest!

It is during the time that we lived on this farm that my little story
is most eventful. I was, at the beginning of this period, perhaps the
most ungainly, awkward boy in the parish--no hermit was less acquainted
with the ways of the world. What I knew of ancient story was gathered
from Salmon's and Guthrie's Geographical Grammars; and the ideas I had
formed of modern manners, of literature,