Saul had spent the past six months in close reading and study, whenever time and opportunity were his. First from his friend the cobbler, then from his friend the Duke’s heir, he had received books and papers; and out in the fields in his dinner-hour, or trudging to and fro with the plough, or up in his attic at night, with his companions snoring around him, he had studied and read and thought--thought till it seemed often as though thought would madden him, read until he looked haggard and wan from his long vigils, and he found the best part of his pittance of wage go in the purchase of the rushlights by which he studied his books at night. Eustace had lent him histories of other nations--down-trodden peoples who had revolted at last from their oppressors, and had won for themselves freedom--sometimes of body, sometimes of mind, at the sword’s point. Eustace had tried to choose writers of impartiality; but his own bias had been too strong to make him a very good director of such a mind as Saul’s; and when a man of that temperament reaches passages which are not to his liking, he simply skips over them till he reaches what is more to his taste; and Saul had invariably missed out those explanatory and exculpatory pages, wherein the historian shows the other side of the question, and explains how some of the grievances most declaimed against by an oppressed people are the result rather of circumstance, and the changing order of the day, than the direct outcome of a real injustice and tyranny.