In a little. *Carefully. ***Not difficult. ****Wages paid in money.

    “With joy unfeign’d, brothers and sisters meet,
        An’ each for other’s weelfare kindly spiers:*
    The social hours, swift-wing’d, unnotic’d, fleet;
        Each tells the uncos** that he sees or hears;
        The parents, partial, eye their hopeful years;
    Anticipation forward points the view. 
        The mother, wi’ her needle and her sheers,
    Gars auld claes look amaist as weel’s the new:***
    The father mixes a’ wi’ admonition due.

    Asks after.
    *Strange things.
    ***Makes old clothes look almost as good as new.
    . . . . . . . 
    “The cheerfu’ supper done,, wi’ serious face,
        They, round the ingle, form a circle wide;
    The sire turns o’er, wi’ patriarchal grace,
        The big ha’-Bible, ance his father’s pride: 
        His bonnet rev’rently is laid aside,
    His layart haffets* wearing thin an’ bare;
        Those strains that once did sweet in Zion glide,
    He wales** a portion with judicious care;
    And “Let us worship God!” he says, with solemn air.

    The gray hair on his temples.
    *Chooses.
    . . . . . . . 
    “Then homeward all take off their sev’ral way;
        The youngling cottagers retire to rest: 
    The parent-pair their secret homage pay,
        And proffer up to Heaven the warm request,
        That He who stills the raven’s clam’rous nest,
    And decks the lily fair in flow’ry pride,
        Would, in the way His wisdom sees the best,
    For them and for their little ones provide;
    But, chiefly, in their hearts with grace divine preside.”

As Robert grew to be a man the changes in his somber life were few.  But once he spent a summer on the coast learning how to measure and survey land.  In this he made good progress.  “But,” he says, “I made a greater progress in the knowledge of mankind.”  For it was a smuggling district.  Robert came to know the men who carried on the unlawful trade, and so was present at many a wild and riotous scene, and saw men in new lights.  He had already begun to write poetry, now he began to write letters too.  He did not write with the idea alone of giving his friends news of him.  He wrote to improve his power of language.  He came across a book of letters of the wits of Queen Anne’s reign, and these he pored over, eager to make his own style good.

When Robert was twenty-two he again left home.  This time he went to the little seaport town of Irvine to learn flax dressing.  For on the farm the father and brothers had begun to grow flax, and it was thought well that one of them should know how to prepare it for spinning.

Here Robert got into evil company and trouble.  He sinned and repented and sinned again.  We find him writing to his father, “As for this world, I despair of ever making a figure in it.  I am not formed for the bustle of the busy, nor the flutter of the gay.  I shall never again be capable of entering into such scenes.”  Burns knew himself to be a man of faults.  The knowledge of his own weakness, perhaps, made him kindly to other.  In one of his poems he wrote—­