The possibility that he received funds from Gilbert even after the deed of assignment must be ruled out. The flow of funds in fact was the other way. The supposedly careful and efficient Gilbert was in constant difficulties at Mossgiel. Robert sent him ten pounds from Edinburgh in the spring of 1787; during the following winter he authorized John Ballantine to pay over to Gilbert about thirty pounds of subscription money then in Ballantine’s hands. And this was only the beginning. The letter to Gavin Hamilton already quoted indicates that Gilbert was so far in arrears with his rent in March, 1788, that Hamilton wanted Burns to sign some sort of a note for him. This Burns refused to do, because he had already lent Gilbert £200--nearly half his receipts from the Edinburgh edition. Whether the previous payments were counted as part of this loan or not is uncertain; probably they were not, for after the poet’s death John Syme declared that Gilbert owed £300, though the legal accounting sets the figure at £200. It seems likely therefore that Gilbert regarded the earlier payments as gifts, and that the sum which Gilbert at last repaid to his brother’s family represented the final loan in 1788. As part of the interest on the loan Burns arranged that Gilbert should pay his mother an annuity of £5 a year and should continue to care for Betty Paton’s daughter. The result was that Gilbert made no cash payment during Burns’s life, and never was able to pay off the principal until he undertook to re-edit the _Poems_ in 1820. Burns had given most substantial proof of his loyalty to his family and in doing so had destroyed his only hope of success in his own venture at Ellisland. Gilbert and his mother and sisters were not the whole of Burns’s responsibilities. His younger brother William was approaching manhood and turned naturally for support to the celebrity of the family. He appears to have been an amiable but ineffective youth. He had served at least part of an apprenticeship as a saddler, and in the autumn of 1787 Burns made some fruitless efforts to find him a job in Edinburgh. A year or so later William set out to look for employment and held jobs briefly in Longtown, in Newcastle, and finally in London, where he died of typhus and where his funeral was arranged by John Murdoch and paid for by Burns. Burns’s letters to this brother during his year of wandering consist in about equal proportion of exhortations to brace up and be a man and of enumerations of gifts--shoes and shirts and waistcoats and above all money. Burns’s position as family capitalist was no sinecure.