a beautiful picture: the poet enlivening toil with talk,
lighting and illustrating all he said with his lively imagination;
Gilbert listening silently, and a group of noteless peasants dumb with
wonder. No artist has yet painted this picture of Burns, as his brother
saw him, at his best. Writers have glanced at the scene and passed it
by. It needed to be looked at with naked, appreciative eyes; they had
come with microscopes to the study of Burns. Far more interesting
material awaited them farther on: _The Poet's Welcome_, for example!
They could amplify that. Here, too, is the first hint of Burns's
brilliant powers as a talker; a glimpse on this lonely peat moss of the
man who, not many years afterwards, was to dazzle literary Edinburgh
with the sparkle and force of his graphic speech.

Probably it was about this time that Burns went for a summer to a school
at Kirkoswald. In his autobiography he says it was his seventeenth year,
and, if so, it must have been before the family had left Mount Oliphant.
Gilbert's recollection was that the poet was then in his nineteenth
year, which would bring the incident into the Lochlea period. In the new
edition of Chambers's Burns, William Wallace accepts Robert's statement
as correct; yet we hardly think the poet would have spent a summer at
school at a time when the family was under the heel of that merciless
factor. Besides, although he speaks of his seventeenth year, he has just
made mention of the fact that he was in the secret of half the amours of
the parish; and it was in the parish of Tarbolton that we hear of him
acting 'as the second of night-hunting swains.' Probably also it would
be after the family had found comparative peace and quiet in their new
home that it would occur to Burns to resume his studies in a methodical
way. The point is a small one. The important thing is, that in his
seventeenth or nineteenth summer he went to a noted school on a
smuggling coast to learn mathematics, surveying, dialling, etc., in
which he made a pretty good progress. 'But,' he says, 'I made a greater
progress in the knowledge of mankind. The contraband trade was at this
time very successful; scenes of swaggering riot and roaring dissipation
were as yet new to me, and I was no enemy to social life. Here, though I
learnt to look unconcernedly on a large tavern bill and mix without fear
in a drunken squabble, yet I went on with a high hand in my geometry.'

The glimpses we have of Burns