pale face and
hands stained a deep blue. He was a dyer, who in the course of dipping
homespun wool and old women's petticoats had got fired with the ambition
to learn a great deal more about the strange secrets of colour. He had
already a high reputation in the district for his dyes, and he was
bent on discovering some method by which he could reduce the expense
of crimsons and scarlets. The druggist at Treddleston had given him a
notion that he might save himself a great deal of labour and expense if
he could learn to read, and so he had begun to give his spare hours to
the night-school, resolving that his "little chap" should lose no time
in coming to Mr. Massey's day-school as soon as he was old enough.

It was touching to see these three big men, with the marks of their hard
labour about them, anxiously bending over the worn books and painfully
making out, "The grass is green," "The sticks are dry," "The corn is
ripe"--a very hard lesson to pass to after columns of single words
all alike except in the first letter. It was almost as if three rough
animals were making humble efforts to learn how they might become human.
And it touched the tenderest fibre in Bartle Massey's nature, for such
full-grown children as these were the only pupils for whom he had
no severe epithets and no impatient tones. He was not gifted with an
imperturbable temper, and on music-nights it was apparent that patience
could never be an easy virtue to him; but this evening, as he glances
over his spectacles at Bill Downes, the sawyer, who is turning his
head on one side with a desperate sense of blankness before the letters
d-r-y, his eyes shed their mildest and most encouraging light.

After the reading class, two youths between sixteen and nineteen came up
with the imaginary bills of parcels, which they had been writing out on
their slates and were now required to calculate "off-hand"--a test which
they stood with such imperfect success that Bartle Massey, whose eyes
had been glaring at them ominously through his spectacles for some
minutes, at length burst out in a bitter, high-pitched tone, pausing
between every sentence to rap the floor with a knobbed stick which
rested between his legs.

"Now, you see, you don't do this thing a bit better than you did a
fortnight ago, and I'll tell you what's the reason. You want to learn
accounts--that's well and good. But you think all you need do to learn
accounts is to come to me and do sums for an