He lost his self-command, and with that went his command over others. Meaning to be affable to the poor, from whose ranks he sprang, he became familiar; and they reciprocated the familiarity so fully as to draw down the contempt of his _confreres_. He was a man to be respected, and they slighted him; a man to be honoured, and they snubbed him. What wonder, then, that eccentricities grew like barnacles on a ship’s keel, or that the boys failed in obedience and respect to a master when their elders set them the example? This defence of a misunderstood man has not taken up a tithe of the time he gave to his refractory class, to whom he went straightway from the confectioner’s, whose “humbugs” had melted considerably, not wholly down his own throat, before the hour when the boys closed their Latin Grammars and Greek Lexicons, and poured as if they were mad down the steps, and through the gate, to the road. Yet even the sweets he gave to the attentive did not conciliate; they only made the intractable more defiant; and even the recipients felt they were bribed. Warned by the uproar of a large school in motion, as well as by the long-cased clock, Tabitha, his one servant, had her master’s tea ready for him the instant he came in from the school, as he generally did, fagged and jaded, with the growl of a baited bear. That day he simply put his head into the house, and bawled, “Tea ready, Tab?” and without waiting for an answer, went on, “Keep it hot till I get back;” then, closing the door, took his way eastwards down Long Millgate. His journey was not a long one. It ended at the bottom of a yard where a sad pale-faced young woman was switching monotonously at a mass of downy cotton, and listening at the same time to the equally monotonous drawl of a youngster in the throes of monosyllabic reading. “Get larning, lad!—get larning! Larning’s a greät thing. Yo’ shan read i’ this big picture-book when you can spell gradely,” had been Simon’s precept and inducement; and Jabez, to whom that big pictorial Bible was a mysterious unexplored crypt, did try with all his little might. “J-a-c-k—Jack, w-a-s—was, a g-o-o-d—good, b-o——” “And I hope you’re a good boy, as well as Jack,” said Joshua Brookes abruptly, as he put his head into the room, and put a stop to the lesson at the same time. “But, hey-day” (observing the swollen nose and bruised forehead), “You’re been in the wars. Good boys don’t fight.” “Then what did Bill Barnes throw stones at ar pussy for? Good boys dunnot hurt kittlins,” said Jabez, nothing daunted. Bess explained. “Um!” quoth Joshua, when she had finished, “he’s fond of his kitten, is he?” and drawing Jabez towards him by the shoulder, with one finger uplifted as a caution, he looked down on the shrinking child, and said, impressively—