When William Burnes built his cottage at Alloway the fact that there was no school nearer than Ayr would scarcely have worried him. His own book-learning was sketchy, his writing cramped and laborious, though his speech was more precise and ‘better English’ than that of most of his neighbours. But he was devoutly religious, and cherished the sound Presbyterian conviction that first-hand acquaintance with the Scriptures was essential to knowledge in this world and salvation in the next. By the time his eldest son was six years old the father, conscious of his own inadequacy as a teacher, arranged with half a dozen neighbours to hire a master of their own. Their choice fell on John Murdoch, a solemn and pedantic youth of eighteen, who in mentality somewhat resembled Ichabod Crane. For wages of about sixpence a day and his board--which meant a share of the oatmeal and kail and part of a bed in each crowded cottage in turn--Murdoch undertook to instruct his charges, not without tears, in the three R’s and also in such elementary music as would enable them to sing the Psalms of David in metre at family worship. In this latter accomplishment he found Robert Burns, who in manhood was able to remember and distinguish in all their subtle variations hundreds of folk melodies, an almost hopeless pupil with a harsh and untuneable voice. At the task of beating into the future poet the elements of spelling, grammar, and syntax he was more successful. Instruction in reading was based largely on a volume of extracts compiled by another Scottish schoolmaster named Arthur Masson--good enough literature for the most part, but too declamatory to be really within the grasp of a six- or seven-year-old intelligence. Robert’s first conscious realization of poetic experience came from Addison’s hymn, ‘How are Thy servants blest, O Lord’: he also memorized the ‘Fall of Cardinal Wolsey’ and other set pieces so thoroughly that throughout his life their phrases came unbidden from his pen. If Murdoch found difficulty in making the children understand the poetic merits of Hamlet’s soliloquies or of long passages from Home’s _Tragedy of Douglas_, he at least convinced some of them that poetry had meaning. One of his favourite exercises was making them paraphrase poetry into straight-forward prose--a device which his most famous pupil subsequently employed in exposing bad grammar in a female admirer’s verses.