A tenant having been at length found for Oldcambus Mains, the family, which had been increased by the birth of three more children, removed back to the Ayton district, to the farm of Whiterigg, two miles from the village.  The house which they occupied here is still pointed out, but it has been enlarged and improved since those days.  At that time, like all the farm servants’ dwellings in the district, it consisted of a single room with an earthen floor, an open unlined roof of red tiles, and rafters running across and resting on the wall at each side.  There was a fireplace at one end and a window, and then a door at right angles to the fireplace.  When the furniture came to be put in, the two box-beds with their sliding panels were set up facing the fireplace; they touched the back wall at one end, and left a small space free opposite to the door at the other.  The beds came almost, if not quite, up to the level of the rafters, and screened off behind them perhaps a third of the entire space, which was used as a lumber closet or store.  Above the rafters, well furnished with cleeks for the family stock of hams, there was spread, in lieu of a ceiling, a large sheet of canvas or coarse unbleached cotton.  There was a table under the window, a dresser with racks for plates, etc., set up against the opposite wall, and an eight-day clock between the window and the fireplace.  “Fixtures” were in such houses practically non-existent; the grate, which consisted merely of two or three bars or ribs, the iron swey from which hung the large pot with its rudimentary feet, and, in some cases, even the window, were the property of the immigrants, and were carried about by them from farm to farm in their successive flirtings.

When at Whiterigg, the children attended school at Ayton, and here young John learned his letters and made considerable progress in reading.  After two years, the death of the Whiterigg farmer made another change necessary, and the family returned to the Dunglass estate and settled at Aikieside, a forester’s cottage quite near to their former home at Oldcambus Mains, and within easy reach of Oldcambus School.  Aikieside is in the Pease Dean, a magnificent wooded glen, crossed a little lower down by a famous bridge which carries the old post road from Edinburgh to Berwick over the Pease Burn at a height of nearly one hundred and thirty feet.  A still older road crosses the stream close to its mouth, less than a mile below the bridge.  The descent here is very steep on both sides, but it seems to have been even steeper in former times than it is now.  This point in the old road is “the strait Pass at Copperspath,” where Oliver Cromwell before the battle of Dunbar found the way to Berwick blocked by the troops of General Leslie, and of which he said that here “ten men to hinder are better than forty to make their way.”