s were now three
shillings a week; and then, twice a day in summer, there was the
beautiful walk to and fro along the leafy high-road. "People may say
of factories what they please," Edward wrote much later, "but I liked
this factory. It was a happy time for me whilst I remained there. The
woods were easy of access during our meal-hours. What lots of nests!
What insects, wild flowers, and plants, the like of which I had never
seen before." The boy revelled in the beauty of the birds and beasts
he saw here, and he retained a delightful recollection of them
throughout his whole after life.

This happy time, however, was not to last for ever. When young Edward
was eleven years old, his father took him away from Grandholm, and
apprenticed him to a working shoemaker. The apprenticeship was to go
on for six years; the wages to begin at eighteen-pence a week; and the
hours, too sadly long, to be from six in the morning till nine at
night. Tam's master, one Charles Begg, was a drunken London workman,
who had wandered gradually north; a good shoemaker, but a quarrelsome,
rowdy fellow, loving nothing on earth so much as a round with his fists
on the slightest provocation. From this unpromising teacher, Edward
took his first lessons in the useful art of shoemaking; and though he
learned fast--for he was not slothful in business--he would have
learned faster, no doubt, but for his employer's very drunken and
careless ways. When Begg came home from the public-house, much the
worse for whisky, he would first beat Tam, and then proceed upstairs to
beat his wife. For three years young Edward lived under this
intolerable tyranny, till he could stand it no longer. At last, Begg
beat and ill-treated him so terribly that Tam refused outright to
complete his apprenticeship. Begg was afraid to compel him to do
so--doubtless fearing to expose his ill-usage of the lad. So Tam went
to a new master, a kindly man, with whom he worked in future far more
happily.

The boy now began to make himself a little botanical garden in the back
yard of his mother's house--a piece of waste ground covered with
rubbish, such as one often sees behind the poorer class of cottages in
towns. Tam determined to alter all that, so he piled up all the stones
into a small rockery, dug up the plot, manured it, and filled it with
wild and garden flowers. The wild flowers, of course, he found in the
woods and hedgerows around him; but the cultivated kinds