The income available for the support of such a large household seems to us in these days almost absurdly inadequate.  The father’s wages rarely exceeded L30 a year, and they never all his life reached L40.  They were mostly paid in kind.  So many bolls of oats, of barley and of peas, so many carts of coals, so many yards of growing potatoes, a cow’s grass, the keep of two sheep and as many pigs, and a free house,—­these, which were known as the gains, were the main items in the account.  This system gave considerable opportunity for management on the part of a thrifty housewife, and for such management there were few to surpass the housewife in the shepherd’s cottage at Dunglass.

The food was plentiful but plain.  Breakfast consisted of porridge and milk; dinner, in the middle of the day, of Scotch kail and pork, occasionally varied by herrings, fresh or salt according to the season, and with the usual accompaniments of potatoes and pease bannocks.  At supper there was porridge again, or mashed potatoes washed down with draughts of milk, and often eaten with horn spoons out of the large pot which was set down on the hearth.  Tea was only seen once a week—­on Sunday afternoons.  And so the young family grew up healthy and strong in spite of the overcrowding.

Before the removal to Dunglass, the two eldest children had been taken from school to work in the fields, where they earned wages beginning at sixpence a day.  Their education, however, was continued in some sort at a night-school.  John and his younger brother James, and the twins, Janet and William, who came next in order, attended the parish school at Cockburnspath, a mile away.  Cockburnspath is a village of about two hundred and fifty inhabitants, situated a little off the main road.  It has a church with an ancient round tower, and a venerable market-cross rising from a platform of steps in the middle of the village street.

On the south side of the street, just in front of the church, stood the old schoolhouse—­a low one storey building, roofed with the red tiles characteristic of the neighbourhood, and built on to the schoolmaster’s two-storey dwelling.  The schoolmaster at this time was John M’Gregor, a man of ripe and accurate scholarship and quite separate individuality.  The son of a Perthshire farmer, he had studied for the ministry at St. Andrews University, and had, it was said, fulfilled all the requirements for becoming a licentiate of the Church of Scotland except the sending in of one exercise, This exercise he could never be persuaded to send in, and that not because he had any speculative difficulties as to the truth of the Christian revelation, nor yet because he had any exaggerated misgivings as to his own qualifications for the work of the ministry; but because he preferred the teaching profession, and was, moreover, indignant at what he conceived to be the overbearing attitude which the ministers of the Established Church assumed