or the purpose of
securing an independent living; "for," said she, "if you have gotten
mechanical skill and intelligence, and are honest and trustworthy, you
will always find employment and be ready to avail yourselves of
opportunities for advancing yourselves in life." Though the mother
desired to give her sons the benefits of school education, there was
but little of that commodity to be had in the remote district of
Knocknalling. The parish-school was six miles distant, and the
teaching given in it was of a very inferior sort--usually administered
by students, probationers for the ministry, or by half-fledged
dominies, themselves more needing instruction than able to impart it.
The Kennedys could only attend the school during a few months in
summer-time, so that what they had acquired by the end of one season
was often forgotten by the beginning of the next. They learnt,
however, to read the Testament, say their catechism, and write their
own names.

As the children grew up, they each longed for the time to come when
they could be put to a trade. The family were poorly clad; stockings
and shoes were luxuries rarely indulged in; and Mr. Kennedy used in
after-life to tell his grandchildren of a certain Sunday which he
remembered shortly after his father died, when he was setting out for
Dalry church, and had borrowed his brother Alexander's stockings, his
brother ran after him and cried, "See that you keep out of the dirt,
for mind you have got my stockings on!" John indulged in many
day-dreams about the world that lay beyond the valley and the mountains
which surrounded the place of his birth. Though a mere boy, the
natural objects, eternally unchangeable, which daily met his eyes--the
profound silence of the scene, broken only by the bleating of a
solitary sheep, or the crowing of a distant cock, or the thrasher
beating out with his flail the scanty grain of the black oats spread
upon a skin in the open air, or the streamlets leaping from the rocky
clefts, or the distant church-bell sounding up the valley on
Sundays--all bred in his mind a profound melancholy and feeling of
loneliness, and he used to think to himself, "What can I do to see and
know something of the world beyond this?" The greatest pleasure he
experienced during that period was when packmen came round with their
stores of clothing and hardware, and displayed them for sale; he
eagerly listened to all that such visitors had to tell of the ongoin