As soon as young Burns had strength to work, he was employed as a laborer upon his father's farm. At twelve he was a good ploughman; a year later he assisted at the threshing-floor; and was his father's main dependance at fifteen, there being no hired laborers, male or female, in the family at the time. In one of his letters, (and it is by extracting copiously from them, that I propose chiefly to narrate his history,) he remarks upon this subject--"I saw my father's situation entailed on me perpetual labor: the only two openings by which I could enter the temple of fortune, were the gate of niggardly economy, or the path of little, chicaning bargain-making. The _first_ is so contracted an aperture, I never could squeeze myself into it; the _last_ I _always_ hated--there was contamination in the very entrance!" And it was this kind of life,--the cheerless gloom of a hermit, with the unceasing toil of a galley-slave, that brought him to his sixteenth year, at about which period he first perpetrated the sin of rhyming. Of this you shall have an account in the author's own language. "You know our country custom of coupling a man and woman together as partners in the labors of harvest. In my fifteenth autumn my partner was a bewitching creature, a year younger than myself. My scarcity of English denies me the power of doing her justice in that language; but you know the Scottish idiom,--_she was a bonnie, sweet, sonsie lass_. In short, she altogether, unwittingly to herself, initiated me in that delicious passion, which, in spite of acid disappointment, rigid prudence, and book-worm philosophy, I hold to be the first of human joys, our dearest blessing here below! How she caught the contagion I cannot tell. You medical people--(he was addressing the celebrated Dr. Moore) you medical people talk much of infection from breathing the same air, the touch, &c.; but I never expressly said I loved her. Indeed, I did not know myself why I liked so much to loiter behind with her, when returning in the evening from our labors; why the tones of her voice made my heartstrings thrill like an Eolian harp; and particularly why my pulse beat such a furious ratan, when I plucked the cruel nettle-stings and thistles from her little white hand. Among her other love-inspiring qualities, she sung sweetly; and it was her favorite reel, to which I attempted giving an embodied vehicle in rhyme. I was not so presumptuous as to imagine that I could make verses like printed ones, composed by men who had Greek and Latin: but my girl sung a song, which was said to have been composed by a country laird's son upon a neighboring maiden with whom he was in love! and I saw; no reason why I might not rhyme as well as _he_; for, excepting that he could shear sheep and cast peats, (his father living in the moorlands,) he had no more _scholar_ craft than myself."