Several years before, Hamilton had rented Mossgiel farm, about three miles from Mauchline, and had rebuilt the cottage as a country retreat. The plan of being gentleman farmer as well as lawyer had palled, and Hamilton now offered to sublet Mossgiel to Robert and Gilbert at a lower rental--£90 a year for 118 acres--than they were paying at Lochlie. The lease was quietly signed at Martinmas, 1783, it being apparent by that time that William Burnes had not many weeks to live. Secrecy was necessary; the Court of Session had not yet rendered its decision, and their action, if it became known, might be unfavourably construed. Whatever small savings had not gone for legal expenses were invested in the new enterprise, and Hamilton pointed out a loop-hole through which the children might salvage something after their father’s death. Robert and Gilbert were already credited with the regular wages of labourers. Let the other children also get themselves ranked as employees on the farm. Then they could enter claims for unpaid wages against their father’s estate, thereby becoming preferred creditors who must be paid in full before M’Lure or his mortgagors got anything. The scheme worked. Enough was saved from the wreck to enable the family, shaken and desperately poor--when the youngest boy, John, died in November, 1785, they could not raise the few shillings to pay for the best mortcloth at his funeral--to re-establish their household at Mossgiel, intact except for its head. The new head was Robert, and in the months that followed his father’s death the full results of his Irvine lessons showed for the first time. In the two intervening years he had been too much oppressed with labour and anxiety to have time or inclination to show the new spirit in all its fullness, though he had shown enough to disturb his father. Now he was free, and the fruits of his freedom were varied and not always edifying. The earnest young debater of the Tarbolton Bachelors’ Club and the self-conscious author of essay-letters gave place to Rab Mossgiel. Burns became the focus for a group of reckless youngsters, most of them younger than himself, who looked up to him much as he had looked up to Richard Brown three years before. Foremost in the group were John Richmond and James Smith, both of them full of the animal high spirits which so often disguise the basic commonplaceness of young minds. Along with Burns they set out to scandalize the orthodox, and succeeded. By the end of 1785 Richmond and Smith, like Burns, had mounted the cutty-stool for fornication, and Richmond had fled from the turmoil to the comparative sanctuary of an Edinburgh lawyer’s office.