The boy thinks it dull when there is no company at the farmhouse of a winter evening. He then sets a pitcher of cider to warm by the fire, and makes himself as comfortable as he can over a book. The few books he reads are fastened minutely in his memory. He obtains _The Perfect Gentleman_ from the district school library, and thenceforth knows what is proper behavior for an Englishman under all circumstances. He reads _The Vestiges of Creation_, and in afterlife is amazed to find half the world fighting the ancient theory of evolution. His love of society causes him to plunge into the vortex of the mite society and singing school if he has anything decent to wear. Cheerfully he works in pantaloons whose legs have been cut off and turned hind side before, in order that the thin and faded places may come on the back of his legs and the unfaded ones on his knees; contentedly he sustains them by one suspender twisted from a solitary button in front around to another on his right side: he knows the farmer's wife has no time to take care of his clothes. But when old Mrs. Lyburn, a woman who can no more design a suit of clothes than a theatre-ceiling fresco, is commissioned to make him a coat out of an old goose-green overcoat, and a pair of trousers out of some thick, old light cloth breeches, and when she cuts the legs of those breeches off at top and bottom, leaving them broad enough for a Turk, with pockets like large bags hanging down inside of them, then the boy rebels and refuses to go anywhere. If he goes he takes his road through Stone's Woods, and comes home the back way by the wagon-house. The boy has grit, real grindstone grit: therefore he keeps this up, and sooner or later he has it out with the old farmer about his clothes. "Well, well, don't rare and pitch like a flax-break: we'll see about it," says the old gentleman. The old farmer takes the boy to town and buys him a sleek, shiny black suit--the coat is a long-waisted, long-tailed frock--and he adds a pair of good "stubbid" shoes, having strings made of leather.