The food was plentiful but plain. Breakfast consisted of porridge
and milk; dinner, in the middle of the day, of Scotch kail and pork,
occasionally varied by herrings, fresh or salt according to the
season, and with the usual accompaniments of potatoes and pease
bannocks. At supper there was porridge again, or mashed potatoes
washed down with draughts of milk, and often eaten with horn spoons
out of the large pot which was set down on the hearth. Tea was only
seen once a week--on Sunday afternoons. And so the young family grew
up healthy and strong in spite of the overcrowding.

Before the removal to Dunglass, the two eldest children had been taken
from school to work in the fields, where they earned wages beginning
at sixpence a day. Their education, however, was continued in some
sort at a night-school. John and his younger brother James, and the
twins, Janet and William, who came next in order, attended the parish
school at Cockburnspath, a mile away. Cockburnspath is a village
of about two hundred and fifty inhabitants, situated a little off
the main road. It has a church with an ancient round tower, and a
venerable market-cross rising from a platform of steps in the middle
of the village street.

On the south side of the street, just in front of the church, stood
the old schoolhouse--a low one storey building, roofed with the red
tiles characteristic of the neighbourhood, and built on to the
schoolmaster's two-storey dwelling. The schoolmaster at this time
was John M'Gregor, a man of ripe and accurate scholarship and quite
separate individuality. The son of a Perthshire farmer, he had studied
for the ministry at St. Andrews University, and had, it was said,
fulfilled all the requirements for becoming a licentiate of the Church