At the time our story opens this house was occupied by William Foster, a skilled ironworker, who was earning his fifty shillings a week, when he chose to do so; which was by no means his regular habit, as frequent sprees and drinking-bouts with congenial companions made his services little to be depended on. However, he was a first-rate hand, and his employers, who could not do without him, were fain to put up with his irregularities. Foster was now in the prime of life, and had a young wife and one little baby. He was professedly a sceptic, and gloried in his creed--if _he_ can be said to have any creed who believes in nothing but himself. Of course the Bible to him was simply a whetstone on which to "sharpen his tongue like a serpent, that he might shoot out his arrows, even bitter words." As for conscience, he ridiculed the very idea of such an old- fashioned guide and monitor. "No," he would say, "as a true musician abhors discordant sounds, and as a skilled mechanic abhors bad work, and therefore cannot turn it out without doing violence to his finer and more cultivated sensibilities, so the best guide in morals to an enlightened man is his own sense of moral fitness and propriety." Nevertheless, he was by no means over-scrupulous as to the perfection of his own handiwork when he could slur over a job without fear of detection; while the standard of morality which he set up for himself, certainly, to judge by his own daily life, did not speak much for the acuteness of his moral perceptions. But he was shrewd and ready, and had a memory well stored with such parts of Scripture as were useful pegs on which to hang clever objections and profane sneers. Not that he had read the Bible itself, for all his knowledge of it was got second-hand from the works of sceptics, and in detached fragments. However, he had learned and retained a smattering of a good many scientific and other works, and so could astonish and confound timid and ill-informed opponents. No wonder, therefore, that he was the admired chairman of the "Crossbourne Free-thought Club," which met two or three times a week in one of the public-houses, and consumed, for the benefit of the house, but certainly not of the members themselves or their homes, a large quantity of beer and spirits, while it was setting the misguided world right on science, politics, and religion. The marvel, indeed, to Foster and his friends was how ignorance, bigotry, priestcraft, and tyranny could venture to hold up their heads in Crossbourne after his club had continued its meeting regularly for the last two years.