Page:Life of Robert Burns, the Ayrshire Bard.pdf/5

Rh raptures up and down after the recruiting drum and bagpipe, and wish myself tall enough to be a soldier; while the story of Wallace poured a tide of Scottish prejudice into my veins, which will boil there till the floodgates of life shut in eternal rest."

When they had been about two years at Mount Oliphant, their schoolmaster left the country. "There being no school near us," says Gilbert Burns, and our little services being already useful on the farm, my father undertook to teach us arithmetic in the winter evenings by candlelight―and in this way my two elder sisters got all the education they ever received." When Burns was about thirteen or fourteen years old, he was sent, with his brother Gilbert, week about, during a summer quarter, to the parish school of Dalrymple, two miles distant, their father being unable to pay two fees, or spare them both at once from the labours of the farm. "We lived very poorly," says the poet; "I was a dexterous ploughman for my age: and the next eldest to me was brother Gilbert, who could drive the plough very well, and help me to thrash the corn. A novel-writer might perhaps have viewed these scenes with some satisfaction, but so did not I. My indignation yet boils at the recollection of the scoundrel factor's insolent let-