e of six he was in a Bible class.

Upon hearing that Darius was going out into the world, the
superintendent of the Sunday school, a grave whiskered young man of
perhaps thirty, led him one morning out of the body of the Primitive
Methodist Chapel which served as schoolroom before and after chapel
service, up into the deserted gallery of the chapel, and there seated
him on a stair, and knelt on the stair below him, and caressed his head,
and called him a good boy, and presented him with an old battered Bible.
This volume was the most valuable thing that Darius had ever possessed.
He ran all the way home with it, half suffocated by his triumph.
Sunday school prizes had not then been invented. The young
superintendent of the Sunday school was Mr Shushions.

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TWO.

The man Darius was first taken to work by his mother. It was the winter
of 1835, January. They passed through the marketplace of the town of
Turnhill where they lived. Turnhill lies a couple of miles north of
Bursley. One side of the market-place was barricaded with stacks of
coal, and the other with loaves of a species of rye and straw bread.
This coal and these loaves were being served out by meticulous and
haughty officials, all invisibly, braided with red-tape, to a crowd of
shivering, moaning, and weeping wretches, men, women and children--the
basis of the population of Turnhill. Although they, were all
endeavouring to make a noise they, made scarcely any noise, from mere
lack of strength. Nothing could be heard, under the implacable bright
sky, but faint ghosts of sound, as though people were sighing and crying
from within the vacuum of a huge glass bell.

The next morning, at half-past five, Darius began his career in earnest.
He was `mould-runner' to a `muffin-maker,' a muffin being not a
comestible but a small plate, fashioned by its maker on a mould. The
business of Darius was to run as hard as he could with the mould, and a
newly, created plate adhering thereto, into the drying-stove. This
`stove' was a room lined with shelves, and having a red-hot stove and
stove-pipe in the middle. As no man of seven could reach the upper
shelves, a pair of steps was provided for Darius, and up these he had to
scamper. Each mould with its plate had to be leaned carefully against
the wall and if the soft clay of a new-born plate was damaged, Darius
was knocked down. The atmosphe