"The poor illiterate distiller and father desired to give his son his name but not to assign him his place in life, not his own road; he named him Alexander and he wished him to be not a distiller but a physician. The boy's mother was a native of an island of the Hebrides--your geographies will have to tell you where the Hebrides are, for doubtless you have all forgotten! The inhabitants of those wild, bleak, storm-swept islands thought much of danger and death and therefore often of God. Perhaps the natives of small islands are, as a rule, either very superstitious or very religious. His mother desired him to be a minister. You may not know that the Scotch people are, perhaps, peculiarly addicted to being either doctors of the body or doctors of the soul. The entire Scottish race would appear to be desirous of being physicians to something or to somebody--not submitting easily, however, to be doctored! "Thus the boy's father and mother opened before him the two main honoured roads of Scottish life and bade him choose. He chose neither, for he was self-willed and wavering, and did not know his own mind or his own wish. He did know that he would not take the roads his parents pointed out; as to them he was a roadless boy. "His mother died when he was quite young, a stepmother stepped into a stepmother's place, and she quickly decided with Scotch thrift. A third Scottish road should be opened to the boy and into that he should be pushed and made to go: he must be put to trade. Accordingly, when he was about eleven years old, he was taken from school and bound as an apprentice to a weaver: we lament child labour now: it is an old lament. "The boy hated weaving as, perhaps, he never hated anything else in his life and in time he hated much and he hated many things. He seems soon to have become known as the lazy weaver. Years afterward he put into bitter words a description of the weaver: 'A weaver is a poor, emaciated, helpless being, shivering over rotten yarn and groaning over his empty flour barrel.' Elsewhere he called the weaver a scarecrow in rags. He wrote a poem entitled _Groans from the Loom_. "Five interminable years of those groans and all his eager, wild, headstrong, liberty-loving boyhood was ended: gone from him as he sat like a boy-spider with a thread passing endlessly into a web. During these interminable years, whenever he lifted his eyes from his loom and looked ahead, he could see nothing but penury and dependence and loneliness--his loom to the end of his life.