he later undertook to teach it in London, and apparently secured some pupils until the Revolution filled the city with refugees who captured the market. Burns ultimately acquired a reading knowledge of the language, but if his riming ‘_respectueuse_’ with ‘Susie’ is a specimen of the pronunciation Murdoch taught he would scarcely have made himself understood in Paris. Murdoch was this time most favourably impressed by Robert’s ability, and, in his own inimitable language, regretted that at the approach of harvest ‘Robert was summoned to relinquish the pleasing scenes that surrounded the grotto of Calypso, and, armed with a sickle, to seek glory by signalising himself in the fields of Ceres; and so he did, for although but about fifteen, I was told that he performed the work of a man.’ Murdoch had seen no signs of the qualities which Burns afterwards declared made him as a child by no means a favourite with anybody; in his eagerness for learning he displayed only the retentive memory and the enthusiastic ardour which would have most endeared him to the pedantic master. The ‘stubborn ungainly something’ which later ripened into pride was filling him with smothered rebellion against his lot in life; the weeks with Murdoch opened for a moment a door through which it seemed that he might escape. He was becoming class-conscious, and was developing a hatred of stupid wealth and power which never left him. His earliest associations with the sons of the gentry had not been unpleasant, for these lads had not yet acquired ‘a just sense of the immense distance between them and their ragged Playfellows’. ‘My young superiours’, he said, ‘never insulted the clouterly appearance of my ploughboy carcass, the two extremes of which were often exposed to all the inclemencies of all the seasons.’ They gave him stray volumes of books; one lad even helped him with his French. Nevertheless, he could remember in manhood how as a mere child he almost choked with rage in church one Sunday at the sight of a pretty servant-lass being compelled to leave her pew to make room for the stupid son of her employer.