THE TAILOR'S WORKROOM.
Have you done laughing! Then I will tell you how the thing came to pass.
My father had a brother, who had steadily risen in life, in proportion as
my father fell. They had both begun life in a grocer's shop. My father
saved enough to marry, when of middle age, a woman of his own years, and
set up a little shop, where there were far too many such already, in the
hope--to him, as to the rest of the world, quite just and innocent--of
drawing away as much as possible of his neighbours' custom. He failed,
died--as so many small tradesmen do--of bad debts and a broken heart, and
left us beggars. His brother, more prudent, had, in the meantime, risen to
be foreman; then he married, on the strength of his handsome person, his
master's blooming widow; and rose and rose, year by year, till, at the
time of which I speak, he was owner of a first-rate grocery establishment
in the City, and a pleasant villa near Herne Hill, and had a son, a year
or two older than myself, at King's College, preparing for Cambridge and
the Church--that being now-a-days the approved method of converting a
tradesman's son into a gentleman,--whereof let artisans, and gentlemen
also, take note.
My aristocratic readers--if I ever get any, which I pray God I may--may
be surprised at so great an inequality of fortune between two cousins;
but the thing is common in our class. In the higher ranks, a difference
in income implies none in education or manners, and the poor "gentleman"
is a fit companion for dukes and princes--thanks to the old usages of
Norman chivalry, which after all were a democratic protest against the
sovereignty, if not of rank, at least of money. The knight, however
penniless, was the prince's equal, even his superior, from whose hands he
must receive knighthood; and the "squire of low degree," who honourably
earned his spurs, rose also into that guild, whose qualifications, however
barbaric, were still higher ones than any which the pocket gives. But in
the commercial classes money most truly and fearfully "makes the man." A
difference in income, as you go lower, makes more and more difference in
the supply of the common necessaries of life; and worse--in education and
manners, in all which polishes the man, till you may see often, as in
my case, one cousin a Cambridge undergraduate, and the other a tailor's
journeyman.
My uncle one day came down to visit us, resplendent in a black velvet
waistcoat, thick gold chain, and acres of shirt-front; and I and Susan were
turned to feed on our own curiosity and awe in the back-yard, while he and
my mother were closeted together for an hour or so in the living-room. When
he was gone, my mother called me in; and with eyes which would have been
tearful had she allowed herself such a weakness before us, told me very
solemnly and slowly, as if to impress upon me the awfulness of the matter,
that I was to be sent to a tailor's workrooms the next day.
And an awful step it was in her eyes, as she laid her hands on my head and
murmured to herself, "Behold, I send you forth as a lamb in the midst of
wolves. Be ye, therefore, wise as serpents, and harmless as doves." And
then, rising hastily to conceal her own emotion, fled upstairs, where
we could hear her throw herself on her knees by the bedside, and sob
piteously.
That evening was spent dolefully enough, in a sermon of warnings against
all manner of sins and temptations, the very names of which I had never
heard, but to which, as she informed me, I was by my fallen nature
altogether prone: and right enough was she in so saying, though as often
happens, the temptations from which I was in real danger were just the ones
of which she had no notion--fighting more or less extinct Satans, as Mr.
Carlyle says, and quite unconscious of the real, modern, man-devouring
Satan close at her elbow.
To me, in spite of all the terror which she tried to awaken in me, the
change was not unwelcome; at all events, it promised me food for my eyes
and my ears,--some escape from the narrow cage in which, though I hardly
dare confess it to myself, I was beginning to pine. Little I dreamt to what
a darker cage I was to be translated! Not that I accuse my uncle of neglect
or cruelty, though the thing was altogether of his commanding. He was as
generous to us as society required him to be. We were entirely dependent on
him, as my mother told me then for the first time, for support. And had he
not a right to dispose of my person, having bought it by an allowance to my
mother of five-and-twenty pounds a year? I did not forget that fact; the
thought of my dependence on him rankled in me, till it almost bred hatred
in me to a man who had certainly never done or meant anything to me but in
kindness. For what could he make me but a tailor--or a shoemaker? A pale,
consumptive, rickety, weakly boy, all forehead and no muscle--have not
clothes and shoes been from time immemorial the appointed work of such? The
fact that that weakly frame is generally compensated by a proportionally
increased activity of brain, is too unimportant to enter into the
calculations of the great King Laissez-faire. Well, my dear Society, it is
you that suffer for the mistake, after all, more than we. If you do tether
your cleverest artisans on tailors' shopboards and cobblers' benches,
and they--as sedentary folk will--fall a thinking, and come to strange
conclusions thereby, they really ought to be much more thankful to you than
you are to them. If Thomas Cooper had passed his first five-and-twenty
years at the plough tail instead of the shoemaker's awl, many words would
have been left unsaid which, once spoken, working men are not likely to
forget.
With a beating heart I shambled along by my mother's side next day to Mr.
Smith's shop, in a street off Piccadilly; and stood by her side, just
within the door, waiting till some one would condescend to speak to us, and
wondering when the time would come when I, like the gentleman who skipped
up and down the shop, should shine glorious in patent-leather boots, and a
blue satin tie sprigged with gold.
Two personages, both equally magnificent, stood talking with their backs
to us; and my mother, in doubt, like myself, as to which of them was the
tailor, at last summoned up courage to address the wrong one, by asking if
he were Mr. Smith.
The person addressed answered by a most polite smile and bow, and assured
her that he had not that honour; while the other he-he'ed, evidently a
little flattered by the mistake, and then uttered in a tremendous voice
these words:
"I have nothing for you, my good woman--go. Mr. Elliot! how did you come to
allow these people to get into the establishment?"
"My name is Locke, sir, and I was to bring my son here this morning."
"Oh--ah!--Mr. Elliot, see to these persons. As I was saying, my lard,
the crimson velvet suit, about thirty-five guineas. By-the-by, that coat
ours? I thought so--idea grand and light--masses well broken--very fine
chiaroscuro about the whole--an aristocratic wrinkle just above the
hips--which I flatter myself no one but myself and my friend Mr. Cooke
really do understand. The vapid smoothness of the door dummy, my lard,
should be confined to the regions of the Strand. Mr. Elliot, where are you?
Just be so good as to show his lardship that lovely new thing in drab and
_blue foncé_. Ah! your lardship can't wait.--Now, my good woman, is this
the young man?"
"Yes," said my mother: "and--and--God deal so with you, sir, as you deal
with the widow and the orphan."
"Oh--ah--that will depend very much, I should say, on how the widow and
the orphan deal with me. Mr. Elliot, take this person into the office
and transact the little formalities with her, Jones, take the young man
up-stairs to the work-room."
I stumbled after Mr. Jones up a dark, narrow, iron staircase till we
emerged through a trap-door into a garret at the top of the house.
I recoiled with disgust at the scene before me; and here I was to
work--perhaps through life! A low lean-to room, stifling me with the
combined odours of human breath and perspiration, stale beer, the sweet
sickly smell of gin, and the sour and hardly less disgusting one of new
cloth. On the floor, thick with dust and dirt, scraps of stuff and ends of
thread, sat some dozen haggard, untidy, shoeless men, with a mingled look
of care and recklessness that made me shudder. The windows were tight
closed to keep out the cold winter air; and the condensed breath ran in
streams down the panes, chequering the dreary outlook of chimney-tops and
smoke. The conductor handed me over to one of the men.
"Here, Crossthwaite, take this younker and make a tailor of him. Keep him
next you, and prick him up with your needle if he shirks."
He disappeared down the trap-door, and mechanically, as if in a dream,
I sat down by the man and listened to his instructions, kindly enough
bestowed. But I did not remain in peace two minutes. A burst of chatter
rose as the foreman vanished, and a tall, bloated, sharp-nosed young man
next me bawled in my ear,--
"I say, young'un, fork out the tin and pay your footing at Conscrumption
Hospital."
"What do you mean?"
"Aint he just green?--Down with the stumpy--a tizzy for a pot of
half-and-half."
"I never drink beer."
"Then never do," whispered the man at my side; "as sure as hell's hell,
it's your only chance."
There was a fierce, deep earnestness in the tone which made me look up at
the speaker, but the other instantly chimed in--
"Oh, yer don't, don't yer, my young Father Mathy? then yer'll soon learn it
here if yer want to keep yer victuals down."
"And I have promised to take my wages home to my mother."
"Oh criminy! hark to that, my coves! here's a chap as is going to take the
blunt home to his mammy."
"T'aint much of it the old'un'll see," said another. "Ven yer pockets it
at the Cock and Bottle, my kiddy, yer won't find much of it left o' Sunday
mornings."
"Don't his mother know he's out?" asked another, "and won't she know it--
"Ven he's sitting in his glory
Half-price at the Victory.
"Oh! no, ve never mentions her--her name is never heard. Certainly not, by
no means. Why should it?"
"Well, if yer won't stand a pot," quoth the tall man, "I will, that's all,
and blow temperance. 'A short life and a merry one,' says the tailor--
"The ministers talk a great deal about port,
And they makes Cape wine very dear,
But blow their hi's if ever they tries
To deprive a poor cove of his beer.
"Here, Sam, run to the Cock and Bottle for a pot of half-and-half to my
score."
A thin, pale lad jumped up and vanished, while my tormentor turned to me:
"I say, young'un, do you know why we're nearer heaven here than our
neighbours?"
"I shouldn't have thought so," answered I with a _naïveté_ which raised a
laugh, and dashed the tall man for a moment.
"Yer don't? then I'll tell yer. A cause we're a top of the house in the
first place, and next place yer'll die here six months sooner nor if yer
worked in the room below. Aint that logic and science, Orator?" appealing
to Crossthwaite.
"Why?" asked I.
"A cause you get all the other floors' stinks up here as well as your
own. Concentrated essence of man's flesh, is this here as you're a
breathing. Cellar workroom we calls Rheumatic Ward, because of the damp.
Ground-floor's Fever Ward--them as don't get typhus gets dysentery, and
them as don't get dysentery gets typhus--your nose'd tell yer why if you
opened the back windy. First floor's Ashmy Ward--don't you hear 'um now
through the cracks in the boards, a puffing away like a nest of young
locomotives? And this here most august and upper-crust cockloft is the
Conscrumptive Hospital. First you begins to cough, then you proceeds
to expectorate--spittoons, as you see, perwided free gracious for
nothing--fined a kivarten if you spits on the floor--
"Then your cheeks they grows red, and your nose it grows thin,
And your bones they stick out, till they comes through your skin:
"and then, when you've sufficiently covered the poor dear shivering bare
backs of the hairystocracy--
"Die, die, die,
Away you fly,
Your soul is in the sky!
"as the hinspired Shakspeare wittily remarks."
And the ribald lay down on his back, stretched himself out, and pretended
to die in a fit of coughing, which last was, alas! no counterfeit, while
poor I, shocked and bewildered, let my tears fall fast upon my knees.
"Fine him a pot!" roared one, "for talking about kicking the bucket. He's
a nice young man to keep a cove's spirits up, and talk about 'a short life
and a merry one.' Here comes the heavy. Hand it here to take the taste of
that fellow's talk out of my mouth."
"Well, my young'un," recommenced my tormentor, "and how do you like your
company?"
"Leave the boy alone," growled Crossthwaite; "don't you see he's crying?"
"Is that anything good to eat? Give me some on it if it is--it'll save me
washing my face." And he took hold of my hair and pulled my head back.
"I'll tell you what, Jemmy Downes," said Crossthwaite, in a voice which
made him draw back, "if you don't drop that, I'll give you such a taste of
my tongue as shall turn you blue."
"You'd better try it on then. Do--only just now--if you please."
"Be quiet, you fool!" said another. "You're a pretty fellow to chaff the
orator. He'll slang you up the chimney afore you can get your shoes on."
"Fine him a kivarten for quarrelling," cried another; and the bully
subsided into a minute's silence, after a _sotto voce_--"Blow temperance,
and blow all Chartists, say I!" and then delivered himself of his feelings
in a doggerel song:
"Some folks leads coves a dance,
With their pledge of temperance,
And their plans for donkey sociation;
And their pockets full they crams
By their patriotic flams,
And then swears 'tis for the good of the nation.
"But I don't care two inions
For political opinions,
While I can stand my heavy and my quartern;
For to drown dull care within,
In baccy, beer, and gin,
Is the prime of a working-tailor's fortin!
"There's common sense for yer now; hand the pot here."
I recollect nothing more of that day, except that I bent myself to my work
with assiduity enough to earn praises from Crossthwaite. It was to be done,
and I did it. The only virtue I ever possessed (if virtue it be) is the
power of absorbing my whole heart and mind in the pursuit of the moment,
however dull or trivial, if there be good reason why it should be pursued
at all.
I owe, too, an apology to my readers for introducing all this ribaldry. God
knows, it is as little to my taste as it can be to theirs, but the thing
exists; and those who live, if not by, yet still besides such a state of
things, ought to know what the men are like to whose labour, ay, lifeblood,
they own their luxuries. They are "their brothers' keepers," let them deny
it as they will. Thank God, many are finding that out; and the morals of
the working tailors, as well as of other classes of artisans, are rapidly
improving: a change which has been brought about partly by the wisdom
and kindness of a few master tailors, who have built workshops fit for
human beings, and have resolutely stood out against the iniquitous and
destructive alterations in the system of employment. Among them I may, and
will, whether they like it or not, make honourable mention of Mr. Willis,
of St. James's Street, and Mr. Stultz, of Bond Street.
But nine-tenths of the improvement has been owing, not to the masters, but
to the men themselves; and who among them, my aristocratic readers, do you
think, have been the great preachers and practisers of temperance, thrift,
charity, self-respect, and education. Who?--shriek not in your Belgravian
saloons--the Chartists; the communist Chartists: upon whom you and your
venal press heap every kind of cowardly execration and ribald slander. You
have found out many things since Peterloo; add that fact to the number.
It may seem strange that I did not tell my mother into what a pandemonium
I had fallen, and got her to deliver me; but a delicacy, which was not
all evil, kept me back; I shrank from seeming to dislike to earn my daily
bread, and still more from seeming to object to what she had appointed for
me. Her will had been always law; it seemed a deadly sin to dispute it. I
took for granted, too, that she knew what the place was like, and that,
therefore, it must be right for me. And when I came home at night, and
got back to my beloved missionary stories, I gathered materials enough
to occupy my thoughts during the next day's work, and make me blind and
deaf to all the evil around me. My mother, poor dear creature, would have
denounced my day-dreams sternly enough, had she known of their existence;
but were they not holy angels from heaven? guardians sent by that Father,
whom I had been taught _not_ to believe in, to shield my senses from
pollution?
I was ashamed, too, to mention to my mother the wickedness which I saw
and heard. With the delicacy of an innocent boy, I almost imputed the
very witnessing of it as a sin to myself; and soon I began to be ashamed
of more than the mere sitting by and hearing. I found myself gradually
learning slang-insolence, laughing at coarse jokes, taking part in angry
conversations; my moral tone was gradually becoming lower; but yet the
habit of prayer remained, and every night at my bedside, when I prayed to
"be converted and made a child of God," I prayed that the same mercy might
be extended to my fellow-workmen, "if they belonged to the number of the
elect." Those prayers may have been answered in a wider and deeper sense
than I then thought of.
But, altogether, I felt myself in a most distracted, rudderless state. My
mother's advice I felt daily less and less inclined to ask. A gulf was
opening between us; we were moving in two different worlds, and she saw
it, and imputed it to me as a sin; and was the more cold to me by day, and
prayed for me (as I knew afterwards) the more passionately while I slept.
But help or teacher I had none. I knew not that I had a Father in heaven.
How could He be my Father till I was converted? I was a child of the Devil,
they told me; and now and then I felt inclined to take them at their word,
and behave like one. No sympathizing face looked on me out of the wide
heaven--off the wide earth, none. I was all boiling with new hopes, new
temptations, new passions, new sorrows, and "I looked to the right hand and
to the left, and no man cared for my soul."
I had felt myself from the first strangely drawn towards Crossthwaite,
carefully as he seemed to avoid me, except to give me business directions
in the workroom. He alone had shown me any kindness; and he, too, alone was
untainted with the sin around him. Silent, moody, and preoccupied, he was
yet the king of the room. His opinion was always asked, and listened to.
His eye always cowed the ribald and the blasphemer; his songs, when he
rarely broke out into merriment, were always rapturously applauded. Men
hated, and yet respected him. I shrank from him at first, when I heard
him called a Chartist; for my dim notions of that class were, that they
were a very wicked set of people, who wanted to kill all the soldiers and
policemen and respectable people, and rob all the shops of their contents.
But, Chartist or none, Crossthwaite fascinated me. I often found myself
neglecting my work to study his face. I liked him, too, because he was as I
was--small, pale, and weakly. He might have been five-and-twenty; but his
looks, like those of too many a working man, were rather those of a man
of forty. Wild grey eyes gleamed out from under huge knitted brows, and a
perpendicular wall of brain, too large for his puny body. He was not only,
I soon discovered, a water-drinker, but a strict "vegetarian" also; to
which, perhaps, he owed a great deal of the almost preternatural clearness,
volubility, and sensitiveness of his mind. But whether from his ascetic
habits, or the un-healthiness of his trade, the marks of ill-health were
upon him; and his sallow cheek, and ever-working lip, proclaimed too
surely--
The fiery soul which, working out its way,
Fretted the pigmy body to decay;
And o'er informed the tenement of clay.
I longed to open my heart to him. Instinctively I felt that he was a
kindred spirit. Often, turning round suddenly in the workroom, I caught him
watching me with an expression which seemed to say, "Poor boy, and art thou
too one of us? Hast thou too to fight with poverty and guidelessness, and
the cravings of an unsatisfied intellect, as I have done!" But when I tried
to speak to him earnestly, his manner was peremptory and repellent. It was
well for me that so it was--well for me, I see now, that it was not from
him my mind received the first lessons in self-development. For guides did
come to me in good time, though not such, perhaps, as either my mother or
my readers would have chosen for me.
My great desire now was to get knowledge. By getting that I fancied, as
most self-educated men are apt to do, 1 should surely get wisdom. Books, I
thought, would tell me all I needed. But where to get the books? And which?
I had exhausted our small stock at home; I was sick and tired, without
knowing why, of their narrow conventional view of everything. After all,
I had been reading them all along, not for their doctrines but for their
facts, and knew not where to find more, except in forbidden paths. I dare
not ask my mother for books, for I dare not confess to her that religious
ones were just what I did not want; and all history, poetry, science, I had
been accustomed to hear spoken of as "carnal learning, human philosophy,"
more or less diabolic and ruinous to the soul. So, as usually happens
in this life--"By the law was the knowledge of sin"--and unnatural
restrictions on the development of the human spirit only associated with
guilt of conscience, what ought to have been an innocent and necessary
blessing.
My poor mother, not singular in her mistake, had sent me forth, out of an
unconscious paradise into the evil world, without allowing me even the sad
strength which comes from eating of the tree of knowledge of good and evil;
she expected in me the innocence of the dove, as if that was possible on
such an earth as this, without the wisdom of the serpent to support it. She
forbade me strictly to stop and look into the windows of print shops, and
I strictly obeyed her. But she forbade me, too, to read any book which I
had not first shown her; and that restriction, reasonable enough in the
abstract, practically meant, in the case of a poor boy like myself, reading
no books at all. And then came my first act of disobedience, the parent of
many more. Bitterly have I repented it, and bitterly been punished. Yet,
strange contradiction! I dare not wish it undone. But such is the great law
of life. Punished for our sins we surely are; and yet how often they become
our blessings, teaching us that which nothing else can teach us! Nothing
else? One says so. Rich parents, I suppose, say so, when they send their
sons to public schools "to learn life." We working men have too often no
other teacher than our own errors. But surely, surely, the rich ought to
have been able to discover some mode of education in which knowledge may be
acquired without the price of conscience, Yet they have not; and we must
not complain of them for not giving such a one to the working man when they
have not yet even given it to their own children.
In a street through which I used to walk homeward was an old book shop,
piled and fringed outside and in with books of every age, size, and colour.
And here I at last summoned courage to stop, and timidly and stealthily
taking out some volume whose title attracted me, snatch hastily a few pages
and hasten on, half fearful of being called on to purchase, half ashamed of
a desire which I fancied every one else considered as unlawful as my mother
did. Sometimes I was lucky enough to find the same volume several days
running, and to take up the subject where I had left it off; and thus I
contrived to hurry through a great deal of "Childe Harold," "Lara," and the
"Corsair"--a new world of wonders to me. They fed, those poems, both my
health and my diseases; while they gave me, little of them as I could
understand, a thousand new notions about scenery and man, a sense of poetic
melody and luxuriance as yet utterly unknown. They chimed in with all
my discontent, my melancholy, my thirst after any life of action and
excitement, however frivolous, insane, or even worse. I forgot the
Corsair's sinful trade in his free and daring life; rather, I honestly
eliminated the bad element--in which, God knows, I took no delight--and
kept the good one. However that might be, the innocent--guilty pleasure
grew on me day by day. Innocent, because human--guilty, because
disobedient. But have I not paid the penalty?
One evening, however, I fell accidentally on a new book--"The Life and
Poems of J. Bethune." I opened the story of his life--became interested,
absorbed--and there I stood, I know not how long, on the greasy pavement,
heedless of the passers who thrust me right and left, reading by the
flaring gas-light that sad history of labour, sorrow, and death.--How
the Highland cotter, in spite of disease, penury, starvation itself, and
the daily struggle to earn his bread by digging and ditching, educated
himself--how he toiled unceasingly with his hands--how he wrote his poems
in secret on dirty scraps of paper and old leaves of books--how thus he
wore himself out, manful and godly, "bating not a jot of heart or hope,"
till the weak flesh would bear no more; and the noble spirit, unrecognized
by the lord of the soil, returned to God who gave it. I seemed to see in
his history a sad presage of my own. If he, stronger, more self-restrained,
more righteous far than ever I could be, had died thus unknown, unassisted,
in the stern battle with social disadvantages, what must be my lot?
And tears of sympathy, rather than of selfish fear, fell fast upon the
book.
A harsh voice from the inner darkness of the shop startled me.
"Hoot, laddie, ye'll better no spoil my books wi' greeting ower them."
I replaced the book hastily, and was hurrying on, but the same voice called
me back in a more kindly tone.
"Stop a wee, my laddie. I'm no angered wi' ye. Come in, and we'll just ha'
a bit crack thegither."
I went in, for there was a geniality in the tone to which I was
unaccustomed, and something whispered to me the hope of an adventure, as
indeed it proved to be, if an event deserves that name which decided the
course of my whole destiny.
"What war ye greeting about, then? What was the book?"
"'Bethune's Life and Poems,' sir," I said. "And certainly they did affect
me very much."
"Affect ye? Ah, Johnnie Bethune, puir fellow! Ye maunna take on about sic
like laddies, or ye'll greet your e'en out o' your head. It's mony a braw
man beside Johnnie Bethune has gane Johnnie-Bethune's gate."
Though unaccustomed to the Scotch accent, I could make out enough of
this speech to be in nowise consoled by it. But the old man turned the
conversation by asking me abruptly my name, and trade, and family.
"Hum, hum, widow, eh? puir body! work at Smith's shop, eh? Ye'll ken John
Crossthwaite, then? ay? hum, hum; an' ye're desirous o' reading books? vara
weel--let's see your cawpabilities."
And he pulled me into the dim light of the little back window, shoved back
his spectacles, and peering at me from underneath them, began, to my great
astonishment, to feel my head all over.
"Hum, hum, a vara gude forehead--vara gude indeed. Causative organs large,
perceptive ditto. Imagination superabundant--mun be heeded. Benevolence,
conscientiousness, ditto, ditto. Caution--no that large--might be
developed," with a quiet chuckle, "under a gude Scot's education. Just turn
your head into profile, laddie. Hum, hum. Back o' the head a'thegither
defective. Firmness sma'--love of approbation unco big. Beware o' leeing,
as ye live; ye'll need it. Philoprogenitiveness gude. Ye'll be fond o'
bairns, I'm guessing?"
"Of what?"
"Children, laddie,--children."
"Very," answered I, in utter dismay at what seemed to me a magical process
for getting at all my secret failings.
"Hum, hum! Amative and combative organs sma'--a general want o' healthy
animalism, as my freen' Mr. Deville wad say. And ye want to read books?"
I confessed my desire, without, alas! confessing that my mother had
forbidden it.
"Vara weel; then books I'll lend ye, after I've had a crack wi'
Crossthwaite aboot ye, gin I find his opinion o' ye satisfactory. Come
to me the day after to-morrow. An' mind, here are my rules:--a' damage
done to a book to be paid for, or na mair books lent; ye'll mind to
take no books without leave; specially ye'll mind no to read in bed o'
nights,--industrious folks ought to be sleeping' betimes, an' I'd no be a
party to burning puir weans in their beds; and lastly, ye'll observe not to
read mair than five books at once."
I assured him that I thought such a thing impossible; but he smiled in his
saturnine way, and said--
"We'll see this day fortnight. Now, then, I've observed ye for a month past
over that aristocratic Byron's poems. And I'm willing to teach the young
idea how to shoot--but no to shoot itself; so ye'll just leave alane that
vinegary, soul-destroying trash, and I'll lend ye, gin I hear a gude report
of ye, 'The Paradise Lost,' o' John Milton--a gran' classic model; and
for the doctrine o't, it's just aboot as gude as ye'll hear elsewhere the
noo. So gang your gate, and tell John Crossthwaite, privately, auld Sandy
Mackaye wad like to see him the morn's night."
I went home in wonder and delight. Books! books! books! I should have my
fill of them at last. And when I said my prayers at night, I thanked God
for this unexpected boon; and then remembered that my mother had forbidden
it. That thought checked the thanks, but not the pleasure. Oh, parents! are
there not real sins enough in the world already, without your defiling it,
over and above, by inventing new ones?