In the same line of argument the sallow-faced journeymen bakers, with their complexions bleached by so much of their lives spent in the atmosphere of the oven, even the forward lads who, after the ancient fashion of Pharaoh’s chief baker, poised on their heads baskets full of ‘all manner of baked meats’ or more ponderous loaves, and traversed the streets of Friarton, had their minds and their very faces sharpened by contact, at once wider and closer, with their fellows. And the bakers were as far in intellectual advance of the manly young louts of millers whose employment consisted chiefly in heaving up and down sacks of corn and flour, and mechanically feeding the mill, as the millers were before ordinary farm servants. Oliver counted, too, on Jim Hull, his father’s old factotum and right-hand man, such a long-established ‘institution’ in the bakehouse and shop, that Peter Constable had been wont to say, Jim was not only a great deal better acquainted with the details of the business than he, Peter, had been able to continue, so that he should not like to venture on any step without Jim’s concurrence, but that, in fact, he would hardly consent to such a liberty taken with him and his position. He knew his own importance, and while he had the interest of the master as much at heart as any Constable of them all could have it, Jim was just a trifle inclined to take the rule into his own hands and reign on his own account. Oliver had compared Jim Hull to those mayors of the palace who had founded the Carlovingian dynasty in the west of Europe; but while Oliver himself felt by no means inclined to act the lackadaisically sentimental part of the long-haired monarchs of France, he believed he might reckon on his man for something shrewd and telling, whether on his master’s side or against him. And Oliver secretly sighed for a foeman worthy of his steel, for the stimulus of the sharpest opposition to balance the enervating languor induced by his sister Fan’s despairing acquiescence, and Ted Green and his companions’ mortifying indifference where Oliver’s will was concerned.