agon and whip, and he does give them a few
ferocious shakes in the solitude of the stable. The boy worships the
clockmaker, who comes once a year on a Saturday and stays over Sunday,
mending all the clocks in the house, the tall, timeworn wooden one up in
the boy's bedroom as well as the rest. This fellow has a taste for
pugilism. While working at the clocks he holds discussions with the
hired folks about Heenan, Sayers, Morrissey, dogs, cocks and horses, and
lets out secrets about mills coming off in London and New York next
week. This is delightful. But once let the horse-pitchfork man arrive,
and there is a regular sitting up at night, a grand debauch of talk on
politics, patent-rights, improved agricultural implements and other
themes, the whole interspersed with original jokes. The old farmer is
obtuse about jokes--

An owl might make him laugh, if only it would wink,

but nothing less could--yet the horse-pitchfork man's jokes penetrate
him.

The boy thinks it dull when there is no company at the farmhouse of a
winter evening. He then sets a pitcher of cider to warm by the fire, and
makes himself as comfortable as he can over a book. The few books he
reads are fastened minutely in his memory. He obtains _The Perfect
Gentleman_ from the district school library, and thenceforth knows what
is proper behavior for an Englishman under all circumstances. He reads
_The Vestiges of Creation_, and in afterlife is amazed to find half the
world fighting the ancient theory of evolution. His love of society
causes him to plunge into the vortex of the mite society and singing
school if he has anything decent to wear. Cheerfully he works in
pantaloons whose legs have been cut off and turned hind side before, in
order that the thin and faded places may come on the back of his legs
and the unfaded ones on his knees; contentedly he sustains them by one
suspender twisted from a solitary button in front around to another on
his right side: he knows the farmer's wife has no time to take care of
his clothes. But when old Mrs. Lyburn, a woman who can no more design a
suit of clothes than a theatre-ceiling fresco, is commissioned to make
him a coat out of an old goose-green overcoat, and a pair of trousers
out of some thick, old light cloth breeches, and when she cuts the legs
of those breeches off at top and bottom, leaving them broad enough for a
Turk, with pockets like large bags hanging down inside of them, then the
boy rebels