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They made a fresh start in life, and if hard work and rigid economy could have compelled success, they might now have looked to the future with an assurance of comparative prosperity. Mr. Gavin Hamilton was a kind and generous landlord, and the rent was only £90 a year; considerably lower than they had paid at Lochlea.
Father, mother, and children all worked as hard as they were able, and none more ungrudgingly than the poet. We know little about those first few years of life at Lochlea, which should be matter for special thanksgiving.
'My brother's allowance and mine was £7 per annum each, and during the whole time this family concern lasted, which was four years, as well as during the preceding period at Lochlea, his expenses never in any one year exceeded his slender income. His temperance and frugality were everything that could be wished.
But the soil was poor, and the factor afterwards pictured in "The Twa Dogs" so harsh and unreasonable, that the tenant was glad to quit. In 1777 he removed about ten miles to the larger and better farm of Lochlea, in the parish of Tarbolton. Here, after a short interval of prosperity, some trouble arose about the conditions of the lease.
Thus the years passed, as Burns himself says, in the "cheerless gloom of a hermit, with the unceasing toil of a galley-slave." Then when Robert was about nineteen his father made another move to the farm of Lochlea, about ten miles off. It was a larger and better farm, and for three or four years the family lived in comfort.
There is only too much truth in Burns' own lines, Where'er I gaed, where'er I rade, A mistress still I had aye. But perhaps all this would have been different had Ellison Begbie, the daughter of a small farmer, smiled favorably upon the advances of the young farmer from Lochlea. She is said to have been a young woman of great charm and liveliness of mind, though not a beauty.
The farm at Mount Oliphant proved a ruinous failure, and after weathering their last two years on it under the tyranny of the scoundrel factor, it was with feelings of relief, we may be sure, that the family removed to Lochlea, in the parish of Tarbolton. This was a farm of 130 acres of land rising from the right bank of the river Ayr.
In his autobiography he says it was his seventeenth year, and, if so, it must have been before the family had left Mount Oliphant. Gilbert's recollection was that the poet was then in his nineteenth year, which would bring the incident into the Lochlea period.
No doubt his life was irregular there; his duties were irregular; his hours were irregular. But Burns in his thirty-six years, had lived a full life, putting as much into one year as the ordinary sons of men put into two. He had had threatenings of rheumatism and heart disease when he was an overworked lad at Lochlea; and now his constitution was breaking up from the rate at which he had lived.
There was but another passenger in the coach, a north country gentleman from the West Indies. I had many questions to ask my townsman, and many to answer and the time passed lightly away. "Can you tell me aught of the Burnses of Lochlea?" I inquired, after learning that my mother and other relatives were well.
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