thing like a French word. Robert was glad to hear this
proposal, and immediately we attacked the French with great
courage.

"Now there was little else to be heard but the declension of
nouns, the conjugation of verbs, etc. When walking together, and
even at meals, I was constantly telling him the names of different
objects, as they presented themselves, in French; so that he was
hourly laying in a stock of words, and sometimes little phrases.
In short, he took such pleasure in learning, and I in teaching,
that it was difficult to say which of the two was most zealous in
the business; and about the end of the second week of our study of
the French, we began to read a little of the _Adventures of
Telemachus_ in Fenelon's own words.

"But now the plains of Mount Oliphant began to whiten, and Robert
was summoned to relinquish the pleasing scenes that surrounded the
grotto of Calypso, and armed with a sickle, to seek glory by
signalising himself in the fields of Ceres; and so he did, for
although but about fifteen, I was told that he performed the work
of a man."

The record of Burns's school-days is completed by the mention of a
sojourn, probably in the summer of 1775, in his mother's parish of
Kirkoswald. Hither he went to study mathematics and surveying under a
teacher of local note, and, in spite of the convivial attractions of a
smuggling village, seems to have made progress in his geometry till
his head was turned by a girl who lived next door to the school.

So far the education gained by Burns from his schoolmasters and his
father had been almost exclusively moral and intellectual. It was in
less formal ways that his imagination was fed. From his mother he had
heard from infancy the ballads, legends, and songs that were
traditionary among the peasantry; and the influence of these was
re-enforced by a certain Betty Davidson, an unfortunate relative of
his mother's to whom the family gave shelter for a time.

"In my infant and boyish days, too," he writes in the letter to
Doctor Moore already quoted, "I owed much to an old maid of my
mother's, remarkable for her ignorance, credulity, and
superstition. She had, I suppose, the largest collection in the
country, of tales and songs concerning devils, ghosts, fairies,
brownies, witches, warlocks, spunkies, kelpies, elf-candles,
dead-lights, wraiths, apparitions, cantraips