On his deathbed, on February 13, 1784, William Burnes muttered that there was one member of his family for whose future conduct he feared, and Robert, in tears, took the admonition to himself. Hardly was the family settled at Mossgiel, after some strictly legal dodging which must have increased the poet’s inward distaste for the whole business, when the traits his father had dreaded began their full play. Though he entered on his responsibilities as head of the family with the best of resolutions, his heart was not in the undertaking. He read farming books, calculated crops, and attended markets, but his mind was elsewhere. According to his own account, he lost interest in the work because of two successive crop-failures, the first owing to bad seed and the second to a wet harvest. But this was an excuse, not an explanation. The real reasons lay within himself. They were his passions and his art. His father’s death had removed the last check upon social indulgence. Always shunning the solitude which produced brooding melancholy, he had found in Mauchline a new and gayer set of cronies whose company was more congenial than that of his family in the crowded cottage at Mossgiel. More and more of his time was spent in the village taverns--not for drunkenness, but for the pleasure of sharing the hilarity of careless youths and the uninhibited wit of older ‘men of talent and humour’ like his neighbour John Rankine. The rigidly righteous began to frown on the young farmer whose reckless sallies were sure to provoke the wildest outbursts of laughter. And even at Mossgiel there were distractions from a sober and godly life. The household included a young servant-lass named Betty Paton, whose charms, like those of most of Burns’s sweethearts, were mainly physical. Within a few months of his father’s death Betty became Burns’s mistress, and in May, 1785, bore his first child amid all the accompaniments of a public scandal in the parish.