He was a gamekeeper's son, and being a merry boy was liberally tipped by sportsmen. Yet he ran away from home at the age of ten. One of his first exploits was the stealing of a bantam cock. It belonged to a woman at the back of the New Town of Edinburgh, says he, and he took a great fancy to it, "for it was a real beauty and I offered to _buy_, but mistress would not _sell_, so I got another cock, and set the two a fighting, and then off with my prize." This is like Mr. W. B. Yeats' Paddy Cockfight in "Where there is nothing"; he got a fighting cock from a man below Mullingar--"The first day I saw him I fastened my eyes on him, he preyed on my mind, and next night if I didn't go back every foot of nine miles to put him in my bag." When he was twelve he got drunk at the Leith races and enlisted in the Norfolk Militia, which had a recruiting party for patriots at the races. "I learned," he says, "to beat the drum very well in the course of three months, and afterwards made considerable progress in blowing the bugle-horn. I liked the red coat and the soldiering well enough for a while, but soon tired. We were too much confined, and there was too little pay for me;" and so he got his discharge. "The restraining influences of military discipline," says Dr. Knapp, "gradually wore away." He went back to school even, but in vain. He was "never happier in his life" than when he "fingered all this money"-- 200 pounds acquired by theft. He worked at his trade of thieving in many parts of Scotland and Ireland. As early as 1818 he was sentenced to death, but escaped, and, being recognised by a policeman, killed him and got clear away. He served one or two sentences and escaped from another. He escaped a third time, with a friend, after hitting the gaoler in such a manner that he afterwards died. The friend was caught at once, but David ran well--"never did a fox double the hounds in better style"--and got away in woman's clothes. As he was resting in a haystack after his run of ten miles in an hour, he heard a woman ask "if that lad was taken that had broken out of Dumfries Gaol," and the answer: "No; but the gaoler died last night at ten o'clock." He got arrested in Ireland through sheer carelessness, was recognised and taken in irons to Dumfries again--and so he died.