Before proceeding farther, it is necessary for me to say that my father was not only a poor man, but his occupation was one of the humblest which a peasant could occupy. He filled no higher situation than that of occasional barnman, and hedger and ditcher, upon a farm near Thornhill, in Dumfries-shire. Neither was he what some would call a strong-minded man, nor did he know much of what the world calls education; but, if he did not know what education was, he knew what the want of it was, and he was resolved that that was a knowledge which his children should never acquire. It was therefore his ambition to make them scholars to the extent of his means. But, when I state that his income did not exceed six shillings, you will agree with me that those means were not great. But my father's maxim, _persevere_, carried him over every difficulty. When my mother had said to him, as a quarter's wages became due--"Robin, I will never be able to stand thir bairns' schooling--sae mony o' them is a perfect ruination to me." "Nonsense, Jenny," he would have said, in his own half-laughing, good-natured way; "the back is aye made fit for the burden. Just try anither quarter, though we have to be put to our shifts to make it out. I'm no feared but that we will make it out some way or other. We have always done it yet, and what we have done, we can do again. Let us give them a' the schooling we can, poor things; and the day will come when they will thank us, or mair than thank us, for a' that we have wared upon them. O Jenny, woman! had I been a scholar, as I am not, instead o' being the wife o' a labouring man the day, ye would have been my wife--but a leddy." A thousand times since, it has been a matter of wonder to me how my parents, out of their niggard income, provided food, clothing, and education for their family, which consisted of five sons and four daughters, all of whom could not only read, write, and cast accounts; but, though I say it who perhaps ought not to say it, his sons, in point of "_schooling_" in higher branches, were the equals, and perhaps more than the equals, of the richest farmer's sons in the neighbourhood. And never did a quarter-day arrive, on which any of the nine children of Robert and Janet Gray went before his teacher without his money in their hand, even as the brethren of Joseph, the patriarch, carried the money in their sacks' mouth. For it was not with my revered parents, as now-a-days it is with too many, who regard paying a schoolmaster his fees somewhat in the same light as paying a physician after his patient is dead, or a lawyer when the cause is lost.