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 ongoings of the world beyond the valley.