“I was presently advanced to the dignity of his secretary. He wrote a miserably bad hand: and his manuscripts were so scratched and interlined, that it was with the utmost difficulty he could decipher his own writing, when he was obliged to have recourse to his notes in lecturing. He was, moreover, extremely near-sighted; and he had a strange trick of wrinkling up the skin on the bridge of his nose when he was perplexed: altogether, his look was so comical when he began to pore over these papers of his, that few of the younger part of our audiences could resist their inclination to laugh. This disconcerted him beyond measure; and he was truly glad to accept my offer of copying out his scrawls fairly in a good bold round hand. I could now write, if I may say it without vanity, an excellent hand, and could go over his calculations as far as the first four rules of arithmetic were concerned; so that I became quite his _factotum_: and I thought myself rewarded for all my pains, by having opportunities of gaining every day some fresh piece of knowledge from the perusal of the notes which I transcribed. “It was now that I felt most thoroughly the advantage of having learned to read and write: stores of useful information were opened to me, and my curiosity and desire to inform myself were insatiable. I often sat up half the night reading and writing: I had free access now to all my fellow-traveller’s books, and I thought I could never study them enough. “At the commencement of my studies, my master often praised my diligence, and would show me where to look for what I wanted in his books, or explain difficulties: I looked up to him as a miracle of science and learning; nay, I was actually growing fond of him, but this did not last long. In process of time, he grew shy of explaining things to me; he scolded me for thumbing his books, though, God knows, my thumbs were always cleaner than his own, and he thwarted me continually upon some pretence or other. I could not for some time conceive the cause of this change in my master’s behaviour: indeed it was hard for me to guess or believe that he was become jealous of the talents and knowledge of a poor lad, whose ignorance he, but a few years before, had so much despised and derided. I was the more surprised at this new turn of his mind, because I was conscious that, instead of becoming more conceited, I had of late become more humble; but this humility was, by my suspicious master, attributed to artifice, and tended more than any thing to confirm him in his notion that I had formed a plan to supplant him in his office of lecturer, a scheme which had never entered into my head. I was thunderstruck when he one day said to me, ‘You need not study so hard, Mr. Jervas; for I promise you that, even with Mr. Y----‘s assistance, and all your _art_, you will not be able to supplant me, clever as, with all affected humility, you think yourself.’