But the peasant life of Scotland, however squalid its physical circumstances as Dugal Graham portrayed them, had a variety of interest unknown to the modern dweller in a city slum. When the technique of all the varied crafts necessary to rural life had to be learned by example and oral tradition, the whole process of living was an education. Almost as soon as they were able to walk the children began to take their part in the work of the farm. At the age of six or thereabouts the boys would be helping to guide the four-horse team which dragged the clumsy plough; not long afterwards they began to share in reaping, threshing, and winnowing, besides doing the innumerable and endless small chores of the farm. These tasks, with all their accompanying observations of plants and animals, of weather and seasons, were stronger influences on Burns than John Murdoch was. No poet has revealed a closer or more accurate knowledge of nature; no poet, it may be added, had less of romantic enthusiasm for pure scenery. Burns knew nature as the peasant and the savage knows it, as something on which his health and prosperity and his very life depend. Readers who are surprised that Burns spent much of his youth in sight of the noble peaks of Arran without ever mentioning them in his verse simply fail to understand the realism of the peasant’s point of view. It was not the dalesmen who won a hard living from valley farms or kept their sheep on the bleak mountainsides who found the poetry in the Lake District. Had Burns been reared on Loch Lomond or at Aberfoyle it would have made no difference; he would have been too busy trying to wring a living from the soil to note the scenery. That had to wait for Sir Walter Scott, who had nothing to do but admire it. Even when he had won fame and had consciously accepted his vocation as a national poet Burns paid only lip-service to scenery as scenery. For him it was merely background for human figures, preferably female. The spots which really stirred his emotions were those with associations of history or song--Cawdor Castle, the field of Bannockburn, Elibanks and Elibraes, the Bush aboon Traquair. And the fact that so many of the folk-songs of Scotland celebrate the streams whose valleys were the only fertile spots may have fostered the love for running water repeatedly expressed in his poetry, as it certainly roused him to do for the streams of Ayrshire what his anonymous forerunners had done for the streams of the Border.