Mr. William Schofield, the client whom Mr. Storth found nervously awaiting him, was a man of some sixty years of age, of middle stature, with hard, one might say, harsh features, his face clean shaven save for a ragged, grizzled fringe of hair that ran down the sides of the cheeks and under the chin, leaving unadorned the close lips, and exposed the few yellow front teeth advancing years had left; eyes bright, keen and greedy. Mr. Schofield had been, as he would have told you with pride, a hard worker all his life. He had known the hardships in his youth of the unreformed, uncoerced Factory System. As a boy, not yet in his teens, he had been a “billy piecener,” walking miles to the mill in all sorts of weather, in winter time long before sunrise, he had worked his fourteen and fifteen hours a day for a beggarly wage of a few shillings weekly, subsisting for the most part on water porridge, which he often had to eat cold. What education he had he had picked up in the Sunday School attached to the Golcar Baptist Chapel. There he had learned to read, to write, and to “sum,” so that by the aid of a ready-reckoner he could make out an invoice. Despite, or perhaps because of, his early disadvantages he had prospered. He had by the time he was forty years old become a small lindsey manufacturer. He worked hard six days a week, and he could scarce be said to rest on the seventh, for he was a deacon of the chapel in whose Sunday school he had learned the rudiments. He had worked hard and he had lived hard, denying himself almost necessary food and fuel and clothing, “clamming,” so it was said by the envious, himself and his wife, that he might put more and more of his earnings into his business. He had no pleasures, unless the hearing of the non-elect vigorously damned every Sunday by a Predestinarian preacher be a pleasure, and excepting always that: great and all-sufficing joy of adding shilling by shilling to his store. He had no children, and when he reflected that unless he left his money to the chapel it should in the natural course go to a spendthrift nephew he often consoled himself by the thought that the nephew could not have more pleasure in dissipating his patrimony than the uncle had in hoarding it. He cared neither for literature nor arts. He never read anything but the Bible, the Baptist Magazine, and the Leeds Mercury. He called himself a Liberal, but his Liberalism was not based so much on a desire for the betterment of the condition of the many as upon resentment of the privileges of the few. And Edward Beaumont was his solicitor, as Edward Beaumont’s father before him had been. “Howd’ye do, Mr. Schofield? Fine day, isn’t it? Glad to see you looking so fit, ’pon my word you look younger every time you give us a call.” It was one of Mr. Sam Storth’s most cherished maxims that politeness—to the people to whom it is worth while to be polite—costs nothing.