A girl’s real education in rural Scotland was obtained in the kitchen, the dairy, and the fields. Almost as soon as they could walk boys and girls alike helped with the sheep and cattle and in all the work of seedtime and harvest. As they grew older the girls were trained more and more for the indoor duties of which cooking was the smallest part. Most of the clothing was made at home, from the carding and spinning of the wool and flax to the sewing of the finished webs into garments. Itinerant tailors made the Sunday clothes of the men; all the rest was the work of the women of the household. Add to these activities the manifold duties of kitchen and dairy and poultry yard and no peasant woman could have reason to complain of lack of occupation. At harvest time men and women alike turned out into the fields, the men to mow with scythe and sickle, the women and boys to bind and stack the sheaves and to glean after the reapers. It was from these barefooted illiterate lasses that Burns got his first experiences in love and his whole simple theory of the relations of the sexes. Woman as the peasant knows her, sharing his daily toil, is not a superior being set apart for adoration. There is no mystery about her except the endless mystery of sex. There may be companionship and a more intimate sharing of the man’s interests than women of higher rank attain. But the peasant woman cannot expect and does not get the graces of deference. Burns’s attitude towards the girls of his class differed in one respect only from that of any other possessive young male. He was a poet, and from the very beginning poetry and sex were inextricably mingled. When as a fifteen-year-old boy he helped Nellie Kilpatrick to bind sheaves in the harvest field, and experienced the primitive coquetry which sought his help in extracting nettle and thistle stings from her fingers, his first impulses were those of any adolescent just becoming conscious of desire. But the second impulse was different. Unable to possess Nellie, he made a song about her.