“The next day he sent for me again to his study, when he was alone; and asked me several questions, seeming pleased with the openness and simplicity of my answers. He saw that I gazed with vast curiosity at several objects in the room, which were new to me: and pointing to the glass tube, which he had been showing the boys when I first came in, he asked me if they had such things as that in our mines; and if I knew the use of it? I told him I had seen something like it in our overseer’s hands; but that I had never known its use. It was a thermometer. Mr. Y---- took great pains to show me how, and on what occasions, this instrument might be useful. “I saw I had now to do with a person who was somewhat different from my friend the waggoner; and I cannot express the surprise and gratitude I felt, when I found that he did not think me quite a fool. Instead of looking at me with scorn, as one _very nearly an idiot_, he answered my questions with condescension; and sometimes was so good as to add, ‘That’s a sensible question, my lad.’ “While we were looking at the thermometer, he found out that I could not read the words _temperate, freezing point, boiling water heat, &c._ which were written upon the ivory scale, in small characters. He took that occasion to point out to me the use and advantages of knowing how to read and write; and he told me that, as I wished to learn, he would desire the writing-master, who came to attend his young grandson, to teach me. “I shall not detain you with a journal of my progress through my spelling-book and copy-books: it is enough to say that I applied with diligence, and soon could write my name in rather more intelligible characters than those in which the name of Jervas is cut on the rock that we were looking at yesterday. “My eagerness to read the books which he put into my hands, and the attention which I paid to his lessons, pleased my writing-master so much, that he took a pride, as he said, ‘_in bringing me forward as fast as possible_.’ “And here, I must confess, he was rather imprudent in the warmth of his commendations; my head could not stand them; as much as I was humbled and mortified by the waggoner’s calling me _an idiot_, so much was I elated by my writing-master’s calling me _a genius_. I wrote some very bad lines in praise of a thistle, which I thought prodigiously fine, because my writing-master looked surprised, when I showed them to him; and because he told me that, having given a copy of them to some gentlemen in Exeter, they agreed that the rhymes were _wonderful for me_.