‘I’m sorry to say he’s no church-goer, sir. It’s his only fault. He was brought up very strict, a little too strict, perhaps. We were chapel people in my husband’s lifetime, and I think he was a bit too hard on the boy. It turned Emmanuel’s stomach against religion. And now he’s got hold of all sorts of queer ideas, and he puts ’em into poetry. It’s beautiful poetry to listen to, full of book learning. My son reads it to me of an evening; but it soars too high for me sometimes, I can’t quite follow the ideas.’ ‘I should like to have a little talk with your son,’ said Cyril. ‘Ah, sir, if you could but bring him to think better of his Maker, and his Maker’s way of managing this world, it would be a blessed thing,’ exclaimed the widow. ‘That’s all my son needs to make him as perfect as any human creature ever was upon this earth. He’s the best of sons, he’s the honestest, soberest, industriousest of young men. But it makes me shudder sometimes to hear him talk; that bold, as if he’d been up among the stars, and knew the way they’re worked. I believe it all comes of too much learning.’ ‘Or too little,’ suggested Cyril. ‘Oh, sir, you wouldn’t say that if you was to see the books he devours. He belongs to the Mechanics’ Institute, and there isn’t a learned book they’ve got that he hasn’t gone right through. He don’t care for stories and such like. He calls them fiddle-faddle. But he’ll sit up half the night over a learned book, and then he puts his ideas into poetry.’ Cyril was warmly interested. To begin with, a cobbler who read Keats and Shelley stood out prominently from the ruck of cobblers. It has been said that cobblers, as men whose habits are sedentary and meditative, have a natural leaning to infidel opinions; but Cyril did not believe this. He did not believe that meditation must needs engender doubt. He who wrote the divinest work ever penned by an uninspired writer, ‘The Imitation of Christ,’ must have been of all men the most meditative. And did not Bunyan’s twelve years of imprisonment in Bedford gaol bear fruit in ‘The Pilgrim’s Progress?’ a book that has done more to popularize Christianity than all the writings of all the bishops who ever wore lawn. Cyril could not see any reason why cobbling and Christian belief should be incompatible. ‘I will call and see your son,’ he said, Emmanuel happening to be out of the way on his first visit. He called the following evening, a dismal rainy evening, when he thought the cobbler, as a man not given to spend his time in tap-rooms, likely to be at home. Nor was he disappointed. Emmanuel Joyce was sitting at a little table, drawn close to the bank of flowers in the window, poring over a page of Carlyle’s ‘Latter Day Pamphlets,’ his elbow on the table, his thin hand entangled in his long hair, and with far from a comfortable expression of countenance.