him, and
devoured bread and butter with a zest that showed that his appetite was
unimpaired by study. As soon as he had finished he caught up his candle,
and with a nod to Mrs. Haden ran upstairs to his room.

Jack Simpson's craze for learning, as it was regarded by the other lads
of Stokebridge, was the subject of much joking and chaff among them. Had
he been a shy and retiring boy, holding himself aloof from the sports
of his mates, ridicule would have taken the place of joking, and
persecution of chaff. But Jack was so much one of themselves, a leader
in their games, a good fellow all round, equally ready to play or to
fight, that the fact that after six o'clock he shut himself up in his
room and studied, was regarded as something in the nature of a humorous
joke.

When he had first begun, his comrades all predicted that the fit would
not last, and that a few weeks would see the end of it; but weeks and
months and years had gone by, and Jack kept on steadily at the work he
had set himself to do. Amusement had long died away, and there grew up
an unspoken respect for their comrade.

"He be a rum 'un, be Jack," they would say; "he looves games, and can
lick any chap his age anywhere round, and yet he shoots himself oop and
reads and reads hours and hours every day, and he knows a heap, Bull-dog
does." Not that Jack was in the habit of parading his acquirements;
indeed he took the greatest pains to conceal them and to show that in no
respect did he differ from his playfellows.

The two hours which he now spent twice a week with Mr. Merton, and his
extensive reading, had modified his rough Staffordshire dialect, and
when with his master he spoke correct English almost free of
provincialisms, although with his comrades of the pit he spoke as they
spoke, and never introduced any allusion to his studies. All questions
as to his object in spending his evenings with his books were turned
aside with joking answers, but his comrades had accidentally discovered
that he possessed extraordinary powers of calculation. One of the lads
had vaguely said that he wondered how many buckets of water there were
in the canal between Stokebridge and Birmingham, a distance of eighteen
miles, and Jack, without seeming to think of what he was doing, almost
instantaneously gave the answer to the question. For a moment all were
silent with surprise.

"I suppose that be a guess, Jack, eh?" Fred Orme asked.

"Noa," Jack said, "that's aboot