Intellectually, that sense was keener and more insistent than ever, but now for the first time it was in direct conflict with a storm of emotions. Burns had come home empty-handed as the prodigal, to find his father visibly sinking under the united effects of worry and tuberculosis. It was plain that even if his contest with his landlord should be decided in his favour he would never be fit to undertake another farm. By the beginning of 1783 the whole family, including William Burnes, realized that death was at best a matter of months. M’Lure the landlord realized it too, and such scenes as had accompanied the reading of the factor’s letters at Mount Oliphant were re-enacted at Lochlie with triple poignance. The children were old enough this time to understand the whole meaning of the affair; their father was a broken man, and where the factor had merely threatened legal action, M’Lure was taking it. The outcome of the case and the practical means whereby Gavin Hamilton helped the family through the crisis will be told later; its emotional impact on Burns himself, coming as it did on the heels of his own failure at business, could hardly be overstated. He saw his father’s lifetime of struggle for independence ending in defeat and despair. Recollection of Mount Oliphant and Lochlie never ceased to haunt his own ventures as a farmer, and helped to damn them. Fear and hatred of one’s economic position are seldom the heralds of success. Burns’s whole nature, in fact, was beginning to cry out against the life he was expected to lead. Not even the loyally accepted burden laid upon him from his father’s weakening hands could hold him steady. He had come back from Irvine, as before from Kirkoswald, incapable of fitting again into the narrow pattern of the life he had lived before his departure. He had outgrown his mould. The dying father noted with concern that his son was spending longer hours with wilder companions, and displaying a new aggressiveness and assurance in his manner of speaking with women. Nevertheless the shadow of the old man’s authority was still enough, when reinforced by the desperate need of securing the future of the family, to inhibit the full expression of the new tendencies. Gilbert’s testimony is explicit. At Lochlie he and Robert were both allowed the usual labourer’s wage of £7 a year, against which was charged the value of every piece of clothing manufactured at home. Neither there nor at Mossgiel did Robert’s expenditures exceed this frugal sum. It was extravagance of emotion, of speech and conduct, not of expense, that beset the poet.