A little more than thirteen months after his parents’ marriage, on January 25, 1759, Robert Burns was born. The Scottish winter was doing its worst--‘a blast o’ Janwar’ win’ blew handsel in on Robin’. In other words, a few days after the poet’s birth a wild Atlantic gale tore out part of the clay gable of the cottage where it had settled unevenly round the stone jambs of the chimney. Mother and baby had to be carried through the storm to a neighbour’s house, where they sheltered until the damage could be repaired. To Burns in later years the incident seemed an augury of his own stormy life. The world had begun to educate him to its harshness almost before he knew that he was in it. Fortunately he had a father who was determined that his children should also have an education in the more conventional sense. Though Scotland theoretically provided a free school in every parish, the usual gap separated theory and practice. Sometimes there was no school at all; often the school was an unsanitary hovel presided over by a master who was expected to live on a salary of perhaps ten or fifteen pounds a year, and who therefore was constantly driven to desperate shifts to provide for himself and his family. John Wilson of Tarbolton, for instance, the victim of ‘Death and Dr. Hornbook’, tried to eke out his meagre earnings by starting a little grocery shop in his cottage, and in 1790 was ready to undertake the drudgery of a legal copyist in Edinburgh in order to better his condition. After the close of the century, when every parish was ordered by Act of Parliament to provide its schoolmaster with a house of at least two rooms, some lairds objected to erecting ‘palaces for dominies’. And even when a parish had a decent schoolhouse and a competent teacher, bad roads and lack of conveyance often made it impossible for children from outlying farms to reach it.