About the time of his last association with Murdoch he began to have occasions for rage without going to church for them. Provost Fergusson died in 1771, and the administration of his property fell into the hands of a steward or factor. Fergusson had probably been lenient if his tenant could not make payment in full on each quarter-day, but it was the factor’s business to get in the rents, and if they were not paid he wrote threatening letters to demand them. It is always difficult for a debtor to see things from the creditor’s point of view; for Robert Burns it was impossible. For him the factor was a scoundrel, and his dunning letters were deliberate efforts to humiliate the unfortunates in his power. Not but what the Burnes family had reason for feeling resentful. They were doing everything that was humanly possible, and more than was wise, to meet the factor’s demands. They lived very poorly, even by Scottish peasant standards; meat was almost unknown on their table; they gave up all hired help. At the age of fourteen, as Murdoch noted, Burns was doing a man’s work, guiding the clumsy plough, flailing out grain by hand, and performing all the other tasks at which brute strength had to serve not merely instead of machinery but instead of well-made tools. His gait became the clumsy tread of the ploughman; his young shoulders developed a permanent stoop from handling the awkward plough-stilts. But the worst physical effect was invisible. The adolescent boy doing a man’s work on insufficient food was incurably injuring his heart. When the lesion began to manifest itself in dizziness and faintness Robert was not sent to a doctor. Probably it would have made no difference if he had been, for the trouble could scarcely have been diagnosed without a stethoscope. Instead he used heroic measures which must have aggravated the ailment. At one time he kept a tub of water beside his bed, and when faintness came on him in the night he would take a cold plunge. All his life he was plagued with fits of depression which he described by the fashionable term, hypochondria. His heart lesion intensified the nervous instability he had shown as a child, and thereby contributed to the perennially reckless conduct of his manhood. In all his life, as in his death, he continued to pay the heaviest share of the price of his father’s struggle to hold on at Mount Oliphant.