agination was quite
starved under their teachings. Tom, her younger brother, was defiant and
sullen. "I wish," he used to say, "that I could collect all the facts
and all the figures in the world, and all the people who found them out,
and I wish I could put a thousand pounds of gunpowder under them and
blow them all up together!"

Louisa was generous, and the only love she knew was for her selfish,
worthless brother, who repaid her with very little affection. Of their
mother they saw very little; she was a thin, white, pink-eyed bundle of
shawls, feeble and ailing, and had too little mind to oppose her husband
in anything.

Strangely enough, Mr. Gradgrind had once had a tender heart, and down
beneath the facts of his system he had it still, though it had been
covered up so long that nobody would have guessed it. Least of all,
perhaps, his own children.

Mr. Gradgrind's intimate friend,--one whom he was foolish enough to
admire,--was Josiah Bounderby, a big, loud, staring man with a puffed
head whose skin was stretched so tight it seemed to hold his eyes open.
He owned the Coketown mills and a bank besides, and was very rich and
pompous.

Bounderby was a precious hypocrite, of an odd sort. His greatest pride
was to talk continually of his former poverty and wretchedness, and he
delighted to tell everybody that he had been born in a ditch, deserted
by his wicked mother, and brought up a vagabond by a drunken
grandmother--from which low state he had made himself wealthy and
respected by his own unaided efforts.

Now, this was not in the least true. As a matter of fact, his
grandmother had been a respectable, honest soul, and his mother had
pinched and saved to bring him up decently, had given him some
schooling, and finally apprenticed him in a good trade. But Bounderby
was so ungrateful and so anxious to have people think he himself
deserved all the credit, that after he became rich he forbade his mother
even to tell any one who she was, and made her live in a little shop in
the country forty miles from Coketown.

But in her good and simple heart the old woman was so proud of her son
that she used to spend all her little savings to come into town,
sometimes walking a good part of the way, cleanly and plainly dressed,
and with her spare shawl and umbrella, just to watch him go into his
fine house or to look in admiration at the mills or the fine bank he
owned. On such occasions she called herself "Mrs. Pegler," an