After the die was cast all Burns’s earlier doubts about Ellisland and his own ability to handle it returned with redoubled force. His first move was to make sure of his Excise appointment by taking the necessary six weeks of special instructions from the officer at Mauchline, even though this delayed his settlement until mid-June. Inasmuch as these six weeks included also the emotional stress of the ending of the Clarinda romance and his acknowledgement of Jean as his wife, his nerves were overwrought when he finally reached his farm. The prospect there might have discouraged a more phlegmatic man. The farmhouse was not even started, and his only shelter was a leaky and chimneyless labourer’s hovel. The sparse growth of the crops planted by his predecessor confirmed the exhaustion of the soil, and he was confronted as never before with the need for executive skill. That aspect of his nature which led him to remark that somehow he could make himself pretty generally beloved yet never could get the art of commanding respect told heavily against him when he had both to keep his own labourers at work and to bully or cajole the contractor into finishing the farmhouse at the time agreed upon. When he was not present the farmhands lay down on the job; when he was present they found it altogether too easy to engage him in talk while the work suffered. The friendship he formed with Thomas Boyd, the contractor, led among other things to an acquaintance with Thomas Telford, the great engineer, but it did not lead to the speedy completion of his house. As late as March, 1789, he was still pleading with Boyd to get at least the shell of it finished. Moreover he was too sympathetic with his workmen. The margin of profit on such a farm was too small to permit indulgence in humanitarian sentiments, but Burns knew too much of the lives of the lower classes to have the necessary hardness. Two letters to the owner of the neighbouring farm with whom Burns had cooperated in digging a drain do credit to his feelings if not to his business capacity. The labourer who undertook the job at seventeen pence a rood had underestimated the time. In order to give him a fair wage for his labour Burns added three-pence a rood to the contract price for his share and asked the neighbour to do the same--with what result is not recorded.