Page:Biographical and critical studies by James Thomson ("B.V.").djvu/422

 406 CRITICAL STUDIES sometimes the newspapers, which I pored on with great earnestness — beginning at the date, and reading straight on, through advertisements of houses and lands, balm of Gilead, and everything; and, after all, was often no wiser than when I began. ... I was about this time [1789] obliged to write a letter to my elder brother, and, having never drawn a pen for such a number of years, I had actually forgotten how to make sundry letters of the alphabet ; these I had either to print, or to patch up the words in the best way I could without them." At Whitsuntide, 1790, he hired himself to Laidlaw of Black House, on the Douglas Burn in Yarrow, with whom he served as shepherd for ten years, and who treated him rather like a son than a servant, and whom he only left to go and keep home with his parents at Ettrick House, when the eldest brother, William, having married, went to live elsewhere. Here he had the use of a pretty good library, con- taining Milton, Pope, Thomson, Young, the Spectator, several volumes of history and travel, and, of course, a considerable store of theological works. Nor were opportunities wanting for reading, meditation, and writing. The shepherd has at all seasons consider- able snatches of leisure ; and from the middle of July to the middle of September, when " summering the lambs," has but to move them from pasture to pas- ture, the dog doing nearly all the work. His chief associates here were his elder brother, Alexander Laidlaw, then a shepherd, afterwards farmer of Bower- bank, on the border of St. Mary's Lake ; and young William Laidlaw, the son of his employer, the author of " Lucy's Flitting," afterwards the steward, amanu-