 Upon being sent to the parish school, young M'Crie soon became not only an apt scholar, but distinguished for applying the habits of hard work in which he would later employ in his historical and antiquarian research.This progress, however, was somewhat alarming to his cautious father, who saw no reason for impoverishing a whole family to make his first-born a finished scholar.Had these paternal purposes been carried out, perhaps the future biographer of John Knox and Andrew Melville would have become nothing better than a thriving Berwickshire store-keeper, or a prosperous mercantile adventurer in London.