Paisley began his acquaintance with a contempt for the slow-moving intellect that he attributed to his sluggish-looking captor. He felt the superiority of his own better education. It was grateful to his vanity to sneer in secret at Wickliff’s slips in grammar or information. And presently he had opportunity to indulge his humor in this respect, for Wickliff began lending him books. The jail library, as a rule, was managed by Mrs. Raker. She was, she used to say, “a great reader,” and dearly loved “a nice story that made you cry all the way through and ended right.” Her taste was catholic in fiction (she never read anything else), and her favorites were Mrs. Southworth, Charles Dickens, and Walter Scott. The sheriff’s own reading seldom strayed beyond the daily papers, but with the aid of a legal friend he had selected some standard biographies and histories to add to the singular conglomeration of fiction and religion sent to the jail by a charitable public. On Paisley’s request for reading, the sheriff went to Mrs. Raker. She promptly pulled _Ishmael Worth, or Out of the Depths_, from the shelf. “It’s beautiful,” says she, “and when he gits through with that he can have the _Pickwick Papers_ to cheer him up. Only I kinder hate to lend that book to the prisoners; there’s so much about good eatin’ in it, it makes ’em dissatisfied with the table.” “He’s got to have something improving, too,” says the sheriff. “I guess the history of the United States will do; you’ve read the others, and know they’re all right. I’ll run through this.” He told Paisley the next morning that he had sat up almost all night reading, he was so afraid that enough of the thirteen States wouldn’t ratify the Constitution. This was only one of the artless comments that tickled Paisley. Yet he soon began to notice the sheriff’s keenness of observation, and a kind of work-a-day sense that served him well. He fell to wondering, during those long nights when his cough kept him awake, whether his own brilliant and subtle ingenuity had done as much for him. He could hardly tell the moment of its beginning, but he began to value the approval of this big, ignorant, clumsy, strong man.