r months at school, coquetting with neighboring
lasses, but with poverty and lack of social position always barring
the way to his advancement.

Through all this, poetry was his solace and amusement; at the age of
fifteen he had written many verses which, although crude, contained
the promise of his subsequent career; but of course at that time they
were admired only by a limited circle of his neighbors and friends. He
also unhappily contracted certain convivial habits, which lasted in a
greater or less degree all through his life, which no one regretted
more than he did at times, and which greatly impaired and finally put
an early end to a brilliant career.

When Robert was twenty-five years old his father, the good William
Burness, died, and the family, who had kept well together, took a
farm about eight miles distant from the old home, near Ayr. Here the
young farmer-poet undertook to become a thorough and industrious
husbandman. He turned his attention toward the literature of the farm;
he tried to bend his powerful though dreamy mind toward the prosaic
and the practical. But the venture did not thrive; some of the
thousand-and-one casualties that are always besetting crops and
crop-growers came his way, and the brave venture which he and his
brother Gilbert had undertaken together, proved scant of success.

He, however, may be said to have done the greatest work of his life
upon that farm. It was while one day weeding the "kailyard," or
garden, with his brother, that he first decided, after they had talked
it carefully over, to be an author, and to write verses that would
"bear publishing." It is to be noticed that from this hour he became
more methodical with his muse and seemed to work toward a purpose; and
that within a short time after this resolve he wrote most of the poems
that have made his name immortal.

In 1786 it was definitely decided that the farm was not going "to
pay," and that his efforts as an agriculturist had failed. But these
were not the only troubles that were gathering in the young poet's
path. In 1785 he became engaged to his "Highland Mary." If we may
judge by his poems, this was the one among his numerous love affairs
in which his heart was most deeply enthralled; but there was another
in which he was inextricably and fatally entangled. It was with a
young girl, Jean Armour, to whom he seems to have been as sincerely
attached as his headlong, susceptible nature would allow him to be to