“I’d have gone mad but for the boy. All my thought was to make up her loss to him. A child learns a man to be unselfish, Jan. I used to think, ‘GOD may well be the very fount of unselfish charity, when He has so many children, so helpless without Him!’ I think He taught me how to do for that boy. I dressed him, I darned his socks: what work I couldn’t do I put out, but I had no one in. When I came in from school, I cleaned myself, and changed my boots, to give him his meals. Rufus and I eat off the table now, but I give ye my word when he was alive we’d three clean cloths a week, and he’d a pinny every day; and there’s a silver fork and spoon in yon drawer I saved up to buy him, and had his name put on. I taught him too. He loved poetry as well as his father. He could say most of Milton’s ‘Lycidas.’ It was an unlucky thing to have learned him too! Eh, Jan! we’re poor fools. I lay awake night after night reconciling my mind to troubles that were never to come, and never dreaming of what _was_ before me. I thought to myself, ‘John Swift, my lad, you’re making yourself a bed of thorns. As sure as you make your son a gentleman, so sure he’ll look down on his old father when he gets up. Can ye bear that, John Swift, and _her_ dead, and him all that ye have?’ I didn’t ask myself twice, Jan. Of course I could bear it. Would any parent stop his child from being better than himself because he’d be looked down on? I never heard of one. ‘I want him to think me rough and ignorant,’ says I, ‘for I want him to know what’s better. And I shan’t expect him to think on how I’ve slaved for him, till he’s children of his own, and their mother a lady. But when I’m dead,’ I says, ‘and he stands by my grave, and I can’t shame him no more with my common ways, he’ll say, “The old man did his best for me,” for he has his mother’s feelings.’ I tell ye, Jan, I cried like a child to think of him standing at my burying in a good black coat and a silk scarf like a gentleman, and I no more thought of standing at his than if he was bound to live for ever. And, mind ye, I did all I could to improve myself. I learned while I was teaching, and read all I could lay my hands on. Books of travels made me wild. I was young still, and I’d have given a deal to see the world. But I was saving every penny for him. ‘He’ll see it all,’ says I, ‘and that’s enough,—Italy and Greece, and Egypt, and the Holy Land. And he’ll see the sea (which I never saw but once, and that was at Cleethorpes), and he’ll go to the tropics, and see flowers that ’ud just turn his old father’s head, and he’ll write and tell me of ’em, for he’s got his mother’s feelings.’ . . . My GOD! He never passed the parish bounds, and he’s lain alongside of her in yon churchyard for five and thirty years!”