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In spite of his struggle for a bare subsistence, the elder Burnes had not neglected the education of his children. Before he was six, Robert was sent to a small school at Alloway Mill, and soon after his father joined with a few neighbors to engage a young man named John Murdoch to teach their children in a room in the village. This arrangement continued for two years and a half, when, Murdoch having been called elsewhere, the father undertook the task of education himself. The regular instruction was confined chiefly to the long winter evenings, but quite as important as this was the intercourse between father and sons as they went about their work.

No less impressive than that of his father is the intellectual hunger of the future poet himself. We have had Gilbert's testimony to the eagerness with which he devoured such books as came within his reach, and the use he made of his later fragments of schooling points the same way. He had a quarter at the parish school of Dalrymple when he was thirteen; and in the following summer he attended the school at Ayr under his former Alloway instructor. Murdoch's own account of these three weeks gives an idea of Burns's quickness of apprehension; and the style of it is worth noting with reference to the characteristics of the poet's own prose.

The record of Burns's school-days is completed by the mention of a sojourn, probably in the summer of 1775, in his mother's parish of Kirkoswald. Hither he went to study mathematics and surveying under a teacher of local note, and, in spite of the convivial attractions of a smuggling village, seems to have made progress in his geometry till his head was turned by a girl who lived next door to the school.

“In my infant and boyish days, too,” he writes in the letter to Doctor Moore already quoted, “I owed much to an old maid of my mother's, remarkable for her ignorance, credulity, and superstition. She had, I suppose, the largest collection in the country, of tales and songs concerning devils, ghosts, fairies, brownies, witches, warlocks, spunkies, kelpies, elf-candles, dead-lights, wraiths, apparitions, cantraips, enchanted towers, giants, dragons, and other trumpery. This cultivated the latent seeds of Poesy; but had so strong an effect on my imagination, that to this hour, in my nocturnal rambles, I sometimes keep a sharp look-out in suspicious places; and though nobody can be more sceptical in these matters than I, yet it often takes an effort of philosophy to shake off these idle terrors.”