egged
on too fast into a field of commercial, intellectual, or emotional
stress for which they lack the fundamental grit, or rather for which
the fundamental grit they do possess is not adapted, nor can be adapted
in a generation. Their spirit, fine and valuable for the old purpose
perhaps, is not suited to the new. Therefore, of good workmen _in
posse_ we make bad clerks and shopmen _in esse_; of good clerks
detestable little bureaucrats or mean-minded commercial men, and so on.
Possible wives and mothers we turn into female creatures. And Merrie
England swarms with makeshift folk and breakdowns.

Happily nature, heredity, sometimes intervenes, and at adolescence the
sharp boy, the pride of the examination room, develops into quite a
nice commonplace young man, like the missionaries' nigger boy, and is
saved, if he be not already committed to an unsuitable career.
Otherwise, what mental deformity and slaughter! It was well said that
education--what is called education--was the cruellest thing ever
forced upon the poor. Mam Widger agrees. She knows her two boys are
above the average in brains, but she says: "I'd far rather for them to
fend for themselves an' make gude fishermen like their father or gude
sailors like their uncles, than for 'em to be forced on by somebody
else to what they ain't fitted for. 'Tis God helps them as helps
themselves, they du reckon, but I can't see as he helps them as is
pushed."

25

Uncle Jake allows us fine weather for the Regatta. "But when it du
break up, after this yer logie [dull, hazy, calm] spell, look out!" he
says. "Iss; look out!"

[Sidenote: _WINKLING_]

The day before yesterday, we were having a yarn together on the Front.
"Must go t'morrow an' pick Jemima Cayley some wrinkles [periwinkles],"
he said. "I got a lot o' work to do wi' my taties up to my plat
[allotment], but I promised Jemima her should hae 'em for Regatta, an'
her shall, if I lives to get 'em. Her says my wrinkles be twice so
heavy as anybody else's what her has--an' so they be, proper gert
gobbets! They t'other fellows don' know where to go for 'em, but I
du--master wrinkles, waiting there for Jake to pick 'em. On'y I ain't
goin' to tell they beer-barrels where 'em be. Not I!--Wude yu like to
come? Nobody goes where I goes."

"Where's that?"

"Ah! Down to Longo. Yu'll see, if yu comes."

"Haven't yu got a mate for it then?"

[Sidenote: _UNCLE JAKE_]

"_Mate!_ I'd rather go be myself than wi' so