John is described as having been at this time a well-grown boy, somewhat raw-boned and loose-jointed, with an eager look, ruddy and healthy, and tanned with the sun, his hair less dark than it afterwards became.  He was fond of schoolboy games—­shinty, football, and the rest—­and would play at marbles, even when the game went against him, until he had lost his last stake.  Archery was another favourite amusement, and he was expert at making bows from the thinnings of the Dunglass yews, and arrows tipped with iron ousels—­almost the only manual dexterity he possessed.  Like all boys of his class, his usual dress was a brown velveteen jacket and waistcoat and corduroy trousers that had once been white.

Along with the teaching he got from Mr. M’Gregor, there went another sort of education of a less formal kind which still deserves to be mentioned.  Now that he was earning a wage,—­it was about eightpence or tenpence a day,—­which of course went into the common stock, he ventured occasionally to ask his mother for sixpence to himself.  With this he could obtain a month’s reading at the Cockburnspath library.  A very excellent library this was, and during the three years of his herding he worked his way pretty well through it.  It was especially strong in history and standard theology, and in these departments included such works as Gibbon’s Decline and Fall, Mitford’s History of Greece, Russell’s Modern Europe, Butler’s Analogy, and Paley’s Evidences.  In biography and fiction it was less strong, but it had a complete set of the Waverley Novels in one of the early three-volume editions.  When he went to Mr. M’Gregor’s, John used often to take butter churned by his mother to the village shop, and the basket in which he carried it was capacious enough to hold a good load of books from the library on the return journey.

All the family were fond of books, and the small store of volumes, mostly of old Scotch divinity, in the little bookcase at Dunglass was well thumbed.  But reading of a lighter kind was also indulged in, and on winter nights, when the mother was plying her spinning-wheel and the father had taken down his cobbler’s box and was busily engaged patching the children’s shoes, it was a regular practice for John to sit near the dim oil-lamp and read to the rest.  Sometimes the reading would be from an early number of Chambers’s Journal, sometimes from Wilson’s Tales of the Borders, which were then appearing—­both of these being loans from a neighbour.  But once a week there was always a newspaper to be read.  It was often a week or a fortnight old, for, as it cost sixpence halfpenny, it was only by six or eight neighbours clubbing together that such a luxury could be brought within the reach of a working-man’s family; but it was never so old as to be uninteresting to such eager listeners.