But all this activity, alike of forgery and of honest collecting, never touched Burns in his formative years. In the boy’s world the folk literature which David Herd was recording was still alive. It is a favourite fallacy of the half-educated to identify book-learning with education. The things which made the mind and the art of Burns did not come from John Murdoch, but from people whom Murdoch no doubt patronized in his most schoolmasterful style. Agnes Broun was illiterate, but she was not ignorant. Like most intelligent illiterates, she had cultivated her memory, storing it with the pithy sayings which sum up generations of folk experience, and with the words and music of scores of old songs and ballads. These simple rhythms, sung as she went about her work, sank into her son’s mind without his knowing it. Years afterwards some chance association would recall an old line or stanza of his mother’s to supply the ‘starting note’ for a song of his own. And her repertoire was powerfully supplemented by old Betty Davidson’s, who ‘had the largest collection in the county of tales and songs concerning devils, ghosts, fairies, brownies, witches, warlocks, spunkies, kelpies, elf-candles, dead-lights, wraiths, apparitions, cantraips, giants, enchanted towers, dragons and other trumpery’. To these tales, listened to with delighted shudders, he ascribed the first awakening of his imagination, even though some of them scared him so thoroughly that their effect stayed with him into manhood. No doubt many a gentleman’s son heard similar stories from nurses and servants, but formal classical education effectually smothered any idea of putting them to literary use. Sir Walter Scott was almost the first child of the upper ranks to realize his folk-heritage, and probably he owed much of his freedom to do so to the interruption of his scholastic training. Ill-health saved him from formalism, as poverty saved Burns.