life. Of his infancy only one incident has come down to
us. In his fourth year, while on a visit to his grandfather's house at
Strathendry on the banks of the Leven, the child was stolen by a
passing band of gipsies, and for a time could not be found. But
presently a gentleman arrived who had met a gipsy woman a few miles
down the road carrying a child that was crying piteously. Scouts were
immediately despatched in the direction indicated, and they came upon
the woman in Leslie wood. As soon as she saw them she threw her burden
down and escaped, and the child was brought back to his mother. He
would have made, I fear, a poor gipsy. As he grew up in boyhood his
health became stronger, and he was in due time sent to the Burgh
School of Kirkcaldy.

The Burgh School of Kirkcaldy was one of the best secondary schools of
Scotland at that period, and its principal master, Mr. David Millar,
had the name of being one of the best schoolmasters of his day. When
Smith first went to school we cannot say, but it seems probable that
he began Latin in 1733, for _Eutropius_ is the class-book of a
beginner in Latin, and the _Eutropius_ which Smith used as a
class-book still exists, and contains his signature with the date of
that year.[3] As he left school in 1737, he thus had at least four
years' training in the classics before he proceeded to the University.
Millar, his classical master, had adventured in literature. He wrote a
play, and his pupils used to act it. Acting plays was in those days a
common exercise in the higher schools of Scotland. The presbyteries
often frowned, and tried their best to stop the practice, but the town
councils, which had the management of these schools, resented the
dictation of the presbyteries, and gave the drama not only the support
of their personal presence at the performances, but sometimes built a
special stage and auditorium for the purpose. Sir James Steuart, the
economist, played the king in _Henry the Fourth_ when he was a boy at
the school of North Berwick in 1735. The pupils of Dalkeith School,
where the historian Robertson was educated, played _Julius Caesar_ in
1734. In the same year the boys of Perth Grammar School played _Cato_
in the teeth of an explicit presbyterial anathema, and again in the
same year--in the month of August--the boys of the Burgh School of
Kirkcaldy, which Smith was at the time attending, enacted the piece
their master had written. It bore the rather unromantic and