4 SKETCH OF THE AUTHOR S LIFE. 



village characteristics, and Younger commenced the 

 school of observation on what he saw and heard in 

 it. There was the now obsolete weaver of " customer 

 wark," the never to be obsolete blacksmith, with his 

 nightly band of quidnuncs, such as Burns saw when 

 a boy the ploughman, the day labourer, the poacher, 

 the hand-spinning matron, the dominie, and the 

 way-faring "Daft Jock." Towards it, as the place 

 of his nativity, and of the earliest and most varied 

 recollections of his life, his heart always yearned. 

 In the Ale he caught his first trout, and under an 

 ash tree, in a corner of the churchyard of the village, 

 was his mother's grave. 



Sixty years ago Scotland was a poor country. She 

 had been fighting during all her history out of a 

 cold soil, a wet climate, and a certain sourness or 

 grim earnestness of character, acquired by long con- 

 tact with hard times social, civil, religious and 

 agrarian when the black famine years, that saw 

 out the old century and ushered the new one in, 

 made clean teeth throughout the land. It may well 

 be imagined what were the sharp household straits 

 that children with empty stomachs had to struggle 

 through. The quarter loaf rose to close on two shil- 

 lings. Wheat stood at one hundred and twenty-five 

 shillings a quarter. Parliament, by statute, enforced 



