Mother Died Too Soon.
Between the time he helped carry home the washing and his elevation to the cabinet there intervened years of the hardest kind of work, and his mother did not live to see his triumph in the end. Almost as soon as he could walk young Burns began to help with such work as could be done at home. At the age of ten he went to work in a candle-factory and received seventy-five cents a week for his labor. That was followed by a short term as pot-boy in an inn and as a "boy in buttons."
Such work did not suit him, and he went as rivet-boy in the Vauxhall Ironworks, and when he was fourteen he became apprentice to an engineer. He had had little schooling, and before he began his apprenticeship he had begun to educate himself.
While he was an apprentice he taught himself French, and laid the foundation of a good reading knowledge of German. He also began public speaking at out-of-door meetings, and it was at these meetings, with their constantly shifting crowds, with innumerable interruptions, and almost continual opposition, that he developed readiness in debate and coolness while under a hot fire of questions.
At nineteen his apprenticeship was finished and he went to South Africa as foreman-engineer on some work being done at the delta of the Niger. Burns, alone of all the white men there, passed through the year the work lasted without a day of serious sickness.
"That's because I don't smoke and don't drink," he said. "I found I couldn't do such things and continue work."
It was while employed in South Africa that Burns unearthed a copy of Adam Smith's "Wealth of Nations," from beneath a pile of sand and rubbish where it had been thrown by some predecessor on the work. This was the only book he had for several weeks of his stay, and he read it and studied it until he practically committed it to memory.