Sometimes he drew at home, and sometimes in Hicks’s room. Hicks had a few books—editions a little out of date, some of them, but all useful—and these were at Johnny’s service: Seaton’s _Manual_, Reed’s _Handbook_, Donaldson’s _Drawing and Rough Sketching_, and the like. Hicks’s room was inconvenient for drawing, but nothing would tempt Hicks next door, and once or twice Mr. Butson had come home when Johnny’s drawing-board and implements littered the table in the shop-parlour, and made objections. “My eye!” exclaimed Hicks, one evening, in face of a crank-shaft elevation and sections, as Johnny held it up on the board; “why that’s a drawin’ good enough to put in a frame! I tell ye what, me lad. With a bit more practice, an’ a bit o’ the reg’lar professional touch, you’ll be good enough for a draughtsman’s job. Lord! you’ll be a master some day, an’ I’ll come an’ get a job of you! Look ’ere, no more o’ this gropin’ about alone. Round you go to the Institute, an’ chip into the Mechanical Drawin’ class. That’s your game. They’ll put you up to the reg’lar drawin’-auffice capers.” Thus urged, Johnny went to the Institute. This was an evening school, founded by a ship-builder twenty years earlier. Here a few lads, earnest as Johnny, came to work and to learn, and a great many more, differently disposed, came to dabble. There was a gymnasium, too, and a cricket-club, and plenty of boxing. And girls came, to learn cookery and dressmaking: and there were sometimes superior visitors from other parts, oozing with inexpensive patronage, who spoke of Johnny and his companions as the Degraded Classes, who were to be Raised from the Depths. And so in the Institute Johnny drew, and learned the proper drawing-office manner of projection. Learned also the muscle-grinder and the long-arm balance on the horizontal bar, and more particularly learned to pop in a straight left, to duck and counter, and to give and take a furious pounding for three minutes on end without losing wind or good-humour. So that his attention was diverted from home, and for long he saw nothing of the misery his mother suffered in secret, nothing of the meek endurance of Bessy; and for the more reason because both studied to keep him ignorant, and to show him cheerful faces.