“Bring the other one that you made after this,” said Anna; who explained to her father that there was one other jar which Brennan himself thought superior to this; and that a third had come off the wheel this morning which was likely to be the best of all. These jars were all the boy’s own property, as he had paid by extra work for the clay and the use of the apparatus. The boy did not bring the second jar, for the good reason that it was no longer within reach. He had parted with it to the green-grocer for the flowers, and money enough to buy these hot buttered cakes. It was difficult to make the boy sit down to table near his own flowers; and then he was too modest to be easily persuaded to taste his own cakes. It was not for himself that he got them, he said. “Did you ever get anything for yourself?” Anna inquired of him. “O, yes, ma’am; many a time.” “What was the last thing you got for yourself?” “Some new runners for the jars. If you please to look, ma’am, this here is a new pattern quite.” “If you had a great deal of money, what would you do with it?” “I would belong to the Mechanics’ Institution, and learn to draw; and then I might get the prize,—a good many guineas.” “And what would you do with those guineas,—help your mother, or marry a wife, or what?” “I would get some marble to cut. Marble is very dear, they say; but I saw a good many marble things in the British Museum.” Le Brocq, always ready with a word against Durell, wished he had taken the boy anywhere but to the British Museum, if he must meddle with him at all. He had heard the proper place to take boys to for a holiday was Sadler’s Wells. If he had gone there, Brennan would have had no extravagant notions about getting marble, or anything else that would come in the way of his being a good potter; and he reminded Brennan that the Scripture told of a potter at the wheel. Anna looked at the jar before her, and wondered whether it would have been produced if the boy had been taken to Sadler’s Wells instead of the British Museum. “You had better be a journeyman potter, boy,” said Le Brocq. “You may make money by informing against your master, if you watch him closely enough.” Brennan coloured indignantly, and only said he should like to cut things in marble, because the excise had nothing to do with that, he believed. When the marble was once paid for, duty and all, there was no more meddling from anybody. “You had better go with us to Jersey, then, if you don’t like the excise; and there you will be free of the customs too. There you may get what you want, without paying even duty. You had better go with us to Jersey.”