Page:Life of Robert Burns.pdf/4

 4 When they had been about two years at Mount Oliphant, their school master left the country. " There being no school near us," says Gilbert Burns, and our little services being already use- fol on the farm, my father undertook to teach us arithmetic in the winter evenings by candle-light —and in this way my'two elder sister 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 they could not be both spared at once from the labours of the farm. " We lived very poorly," says the poet : " I was a dexterous plough- man for my age, and the next eldest to me was a brother (Gilbert), who could drive the plough very well, and help me to thrash the corn. A novel- writer might perhaps hare viewed these scenes with some satisfaction, but so did not I. My, in- dignation yet boils at the recollection of the scoundrel factor's insolent letters, which used to set us all in tears." " To the buffetings of misfor- tune," says Gilbert, « we could only oppose hard labour, and the most rigid economy. We lived very sparingly. I doubt not but the hard labour and sorrow of this period of life, was in a great measure the cause of that depression of spirits with which Robert was so often afflicted through his whole life afterwards. At this time he was almost continually afflicted in the evenings with a dull headache, which, at a future period of his life, was exchanged for a palpitation of the heart, and 'a threatening of fainting and suffocation in his bed, in the night time." About a year after this period, their old school-