On Burns the first effect of the removal to Lochlie was social. The farm was within easy reach of Tarbolton village, where he found the companionship his nature craved. Of his friends at Mount Oliphant James Candlish’s is the only name that has not perished; those of the Tarbolton cronies are enshrined in both verse and prose. For the first couple of years the records are almost blank. By his own testimony, and Gilbert’s, he was constantly falling tempestuously in love, usually with girls of his own rank, or below it, for ‘he had always a particular jealousy of people who were richer than himself, or who had more consequence in life’. His imagination could always endow any girl to whom he was attracted with a plentiful stock of charms which bystanders often failed to perceive. His ready pen, moreover, was constantly at the service of his less fluent friends who sought his aid in composing their love-letters, and he ‘felt as much pleasure at being in the secret of half the amours in the parish, as ever did Premier at knowing the intrigues of half the courts of Europe.’ But Gilbert’s testimony corroborates his own statement that none of these early affairs passed the bounds of decorum. The fervours which he had first experienced when reaping with Nellie Kilpatrick at the age of fifteen were growing stronger and more clearly defined, but they were still adolescent. This adolescent Burns figures also in the proceedings of the Tarbolton Bachelors’ Club, a social and debating society which he and a few friends organized in the autumn of 1780. Its fragmentary records show the youths arguing such windy topics as Burns had discussed with Niven five years before, but with a more direct application to his own walk of life. E. g., ‘Whether is the savage man or the peasant of a civilized country, in the most happy situation?’ ‘Whether is a young man of the lower ranks of life likeliest to be happy who has got a good education, and his mind well informed, or he who has just the education and information of those around him?’ ‘Whether between friends, who have no reason to doubt each other’s friendship, there should be any reserve?’ Such topics point to Burns as their propounder, as do some of the Club’s rules. The one which barred religious topics was doubtless in the interest of peace, but Burns’s hand is evident in the tenth and last: ‘Every man proper for a member of this society must have a frank, honest, open heart; above anything dirty or mean; and must be a professed lover of one or more of the female sex. No haughty, self-conceited person, who looks upon himself as superior to the rest of the club, and especially no mean-spirited, worldly mortal, whose only will is to heap up money, shall on any pretence whatever be admitted....’