And so the years went on, the family at Mount Oliphant living a hard and sparing life.  For years they never knew what it was to have meat for dinner, yet when Robert was thirteen his father managed to send him and Gilbert week about to a school two or three miles away.  He could not send them both together, for he could neither afford to pay two fees, nor could he spare both boys at once, as already the children helped with the farm work.

At fifteen Robert was his father’s chief laborer.  He was a very good plowman, and no one in all the countryside could wield the scythe or the threshing-flail with so much skill and vigor.  He worked hard, yet he found time to read, borrowing books from whoever would lend them.  Thus, before he was fifteen, he had read Shakespeare, and Pope, and the Spectator, besides a good many other books which would seem to most boys of to-day very dull indeed.  But the book he liked best was a collection of songs.  He carried it about with him.  “I pored over them,” he says, “driving in my cart, or walking to labour, song by song, verse by verse.”

Thus the years passed, as Burns himself says, in the “cheerless gloom of a hermit, with the unceasing toil of a galley-slave.”  Then when Robert was about nineteen his father made another move to the farm of Lochlea, about ten miles off.  It was a larger and better farm, and for three or four years the family lived in comfort.  In one of Burns’s own poems, The Cotter’s Saturday Night, we get some idea of the simple home life these kindly God-fearing peasants led—­

    “November chill blaws loud wi’ angry sugh;*
        The short’ning winter-day is near a close;
    The miry bests retreating frae the pleugh;
        The black’ning trains o’ craws to their repose;
        The toil-worn Cotter Frae his labour goes,

    This night his weekly moil is at an end,
        Collects his spades, his mattocks, and his hoes,
    Hoping the morn in ease and rest to spend,
    And weary, o’er the moor, his course does hameward bend.

    Whistling sound.

    “At length his lonely cot appears in view,
        Beneath the shelter of an aged tree;
    Th’ expectant wee-things, toddlin, stacher* through
        To meet their dad, wi’ flichterin** noise and glee. 
        His wee bit ingle, blinkin bonnily,
    His clean hearth-stane, his thriftie wifie’s smile,
        The lisping infant prattling on his knee,
    Does a’ his weary carking care beguile,
    An’ makes him quite forget his labour and his toil.

    Stagger.
    *To run with outspread arms.

    Belyve,* the elder bairns come drapping in,
        At service out, amang the farmers roun’;
    Some ca’ the pleugh, some herd, some tentie** rin
        A cannie*** errand to a neebor town: 
        Their eldest hope, their Jenny, woman grown,
    In youthfu’ bloom, love sparkling in her e’e
        Comes hame, perhaps, to show a braw new gown,
    Or deposite her sair-won penny-fee,****
    To help her parents dear, if they in hardship be.