William Burnes had had some training as a gardener, and found his first employment in Edinburgh. By 1750, however, he was in Ayrshire, where, after brief service on two other estates, he finally entered the service of Provost William Fergusson, laird of Doonholm in Alloway parish. These frequent moves were not wholly the result of unsettled labour conditions. Pride and self-assertiveness handicap the man doomed to subordination, and these traits William Burnes possessed in full measure. ‘Stubborn, ungainly Integrity’, said Burns of his father, ‘and headlong, ungovernable Irascibility are disqualifying circumstances’. William Burnes needed to be his own master, and in 1757 managed to ‘feu’ (lease in perpetuity) seven acres of land a few hundred yards north of the ruined old Kirk of Alloway. Besides longing for a farm of his own, William Burnes wanted a wife and a home. Seven acres of market-garden, supplemented by continued part-time employment at Doonholm, made marriage possible. With his own hands he raised the rammed-clay walls of a cottage on his land--a cottage which his younger son declared, with more emphasis than the timid Gilbert usually permitted himself, to be ‘such as no family of the same rank, in the present improved style of living, would think themselves ill lodged in’. From without, the whitewashed walls and thatched roof of the ‘clay biggin’ were picturesque enough; within, it was damp, dark, and narrow, and smelly withal, for the byre and stable were under the same roof of rat-infested thatch. But such rural Scots as lived to grow up in those days were inured to dampness, smells, and vermin, and it was probably with unmixed pride that William Burnes and his wife set up housekeeping in December, 1757. The bridegroom was ‘advanced in life’; he was in fact almost as old when he married as his famous son was when he died. His red-haired bride, twelve years his junior, was Agnes Broun of Kirkoswald. The daughter of a small farmer, she had been accustomed from childhood to the life of toil which marriage intensified. Her girlhood as housekeeper for her widowed father and manager of his younger children had given plenty of domestic training, but formal education was too great a luxury for girls; the mother of Scotland’s greatest poet was never able to write her own name. She had, however, a sort of literary education more valuable for her son than savouring at first hand the dullness of Boston’s _Fourfold State_ could have been. Blessed with a sense of humour, a retentive memory, and a keen ear, the girl had stored her mind with a wealth of ballads, folk-songs, and country sayings which later became an integral part of her son’s thought and art. The seeds of the poet’s imagination and wit were his mother’s; William Burnes’s most conspicuous contribution to his son’s character was his fierce and prickly pride.