A boy seldom realizes that he is overstraining himself. What irked Burns at the time, far more than ‘the unceasing moil of a galley-slave’, was the fact that he was almost wholly cut off from social intercourse. Burns may not have been wholly an extrovert, but he needed society as an outlet for his high spirits and as a refuge from his low ones. In his earlier boyhood he had found friends both among schoolfellows of his own rank and among the sons of neighbouring gentlemen. At Mount Oliphant he was cut off. Murdoch would come out on his half-holidays, ‘with one or two persons more intelligent than [himself], that good William Burnes might enjoy a mental feast’. This conversation of ‘solid reason, sensible remark, and a moderate seasoning of jocularity’ was not what the boy needed. Robert and Gilbert ‘began to talk and reason like men, much sooner than their neighbours’, but this precocious maturity only made the lad more acutely conscious of his own lack of advantages. He envied the greater ease and assurance of his more fortunate fellows, and out of this envy and self-consciousness grew the aggressive manner upon which some of the gentry later remarked with disfavour. As William Burnes’s tenure at Mount Oliphant neared its end the clouds opened a little. The father had never wholly abandoned his hope of providing his eldest son with some sort of education, and in the summer of 1775 managed to send him for a few weeks to learn ‘dialling and mensuration’ at Kirkoswald. Superficially the venture seemed as fruitless as the earlier effort to learn French in three weeks. The master, Hugh Rodger, was as pedantic as Murdoch, but inclined to be harsh and sarcastic where Murdoch was earnest and encouraging. Though Burns acquired some practical mathematics which later proved useful in his Excise work, he found the more vivid part of his education outside the classroom. With William Niven, a classmate of his own age, he indulged in spirited impromptu debates on such adolescent topics as ‘Whether is a great general or a respectable merchant the most valuable member of society?’ With a girl named Peggy Thomson he fell in love briefly, but so violently as to disorganize his work during his last days at school. Above all, he got glimpses of a sort of life very different from the seclusion of Mount Oliphant.