As we have seen, courtship among the peasantry was no private matter. Not only did everyone know who was courting whom, but the aid of interested friends was habitually enlisted in arranging trysts. While still in his teens Burns displayed a command of the written word--insufferably turgid though the few surviving specimens of his early love-letters seem to us--which made him the chosen secretary for his less fluent cronies. He himself fell into love and out again with ease and frequency. But his early sweethearts are, like Nellie Kilpatrick, names and nothing more. Burns’s statement that his relations with women were entirely innocent until after he met Richard Brown in 1781 is countered by Brown’s charge that he was already fully initiated. As Henley says, it is one man’s word against another’s; since Burns was not in the habit of lying about his own conduct we may believe him. Where, when, or with whom his initiation took place is both uncertain and unimportant. His own assertion that he ‘commenced a fornicator’ with Betty Paton is subject to the discount always to be charged against poetical versions of prose facts. The certainty is that the years following his return from Irvine were loaded with emotional tension by three women--Elizabeth Paton, Mary Campbell, and Jean Armour. Of the three the one who has received the most attention probably deserves the least. No glamour of romance shields Betty Paton. A servant of his mother’s at Lochlie and Mossgiel, she succumbed willingly enough to the advances of the young farmer whom his father’s death had just released from tutelage, and in due course bore him a daughter in the spring of 1785. According to Gilbert Burns, Robert wanted to marry her, but was dissuaded by his family, who feared that her coarseness would soon disgust him. Perhaps so, but the only contemporary letter does not include matrimonial desire among the feelings it hints at. After the first embarrassment wore off and he and Betty had duly stood thrice before the congregation of Mauchline Kirk to be admonished for their sin, Burns brazened it out to the scandal of his stricter neighbours, and Betty accepted it resignedly, knowing that such accidents would happen and that they need not necessarily impair her future career. Part of her resignation, however, may have been conviction that Robert Burns had insufficient prospects to make marriage worth fighting for. In the fall of 1786, when the Kilmarnock _Poems_ had supplied her erstwhile lover with a little ready cash, Betty promptly demanded maintenance for herself and her child. In settling the claim Burns apparently had to pay over rather more than half his profits, besides legally binding himself for the complete support and education of his daughter. When on December 1, 1786, she signed with her mark the legal discharge of her claim, Betty Paton disappeared from Burns’s life. She was a merry lass; her lover had paid for his fun; the account