He could not send them both together, for he
could neither afford to pay two fees, nor could he spare both
boys at once, as already the children helped with the farm work.
At fifteen Robert was his father's chief laborer. He was a very
good plowman, and no one in all the countryside could wield the
scythe or the threshing-flail with so much skill and vigor. He
worked hard, yet he found time to read, borrowing books from
whoever would lend them. Thus, before he was fifteen, he had
read Shakespeare, and Pope, and the Spectator, besides a good
many other books which would seem to most boys of to-day very
dull indeed. But the book he liked best was a collection of
songs. He carried it about with him. "I pored over them," he
says, "driving in my cart, or walking to labour, song by song,
verse by verse."
Thus the years passed, as Burns himself says, in the "cheerless
gloom of a hermit, with the unceasing toil of a galley-slave."
Then when Robert was about nineteen his father made another move
to the farm of Lochlea, about ten miles off.
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