Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 36.djvu/415

Rh was called excellent, and his language was simple and idiomatic. The taste for reading, which he early developed, largely made up for his scanty schooling. At one time he was sent to be a herd on a farm called Bakerfield, not far from Paisley, where he remained probably not more than a single summer. It is said that "he was a very careless herd, letting the kye transgress on the corn, being very often busied with some book."

In his thirteenth year he was bound apprentice as a weaver, for three years, to his brother-in-law, William Duncan. Having served out his time in 1782, he continued a weaver "by constraint, not willingly," for four years, living part of the time under his father's roof in Paisley and in Lochwinnoch, and finally with his brother-in-law at Queensferry. His taste was for outdoor life, and he had inherited a feeble constitution from his mother, so that the loom was irksome to him both mentally and physically. During this period young Wilson began to contribute verses to the local newspapers. His best piece, however, "Watty and Meg," was published in 1792, as a penny chap-book, without his name, and was ascribed to Robert Burns. The latter, who lived not far away, and was but six years older, 'strengthened the compliment by avowing that he should have been glad to be its author. Wilson's descriptive pieces are interesting, from the evidence they give of his natural fondness for the woods and fields.

After a while Duncan decided to "travel" as a peddler through the eastern districts of Scotland, and invited Alexander to accompany him. Accordingly, the two abandoned the loom and entered upon their new occupation. The Scotch peddler of that time was generally a man of shrewdness and common sense, probably resembling the best type of our own departed Yankee peddler, and was generally respected by the common people, but often suspected and despised by the wealthier. This occupation, although it delivered Wilson from the confinement of the weaving-room, was not all sunshine. It involved trials and rebuffs, which to a man, as Grosart calls him, "of sensitive, strangely refined if also in elements as strangely coarsened temperament," must have been hardly borne. His "Journal as a Pedlar," several poems bearing on his experiences of the road, and his earlier letters, give a realizing sense of the lights and shadows of this kind of life. In addition to his trading, he solicited subscriptions for a volume of poems, which he published in 1790.

In a short time he dropped the pack and returned to his hated trade of weaving. Being in ill-health and sorely oppressed by poverty, he was at this period much given to despondency. Yet he