It was Master Swift who looked, and snatching the slate he brought it down on the sharp corner of the desk, and broke it to pieces. Then he went back to his place, and spoke neither bad nor good to Jan for the rest of the school-time. Jan would much rather have been beaten. Once or twice he made essay to go up to Master Swift’s desk, but the old man’s stern countenance discouraged him, and he finally shrank into a corner and sat weeping bitterly. He sat there till every scholar but himself had gone, and still the schoolmaster did not speak. Jan slunk out, and when Master Swift turned homewards Jan followed silently in his footsteps through the snow. At the door of the cottage, the old man looked round with a relenting face. “I suppose Rufus’ll insist on your coming in,” said he; and Jan rushing in hid his face in Rufus’s curls, and sobbed heavily. “Tut, tut!” said the schoolmaster. “No more of that, child. There’s bitters enough in life, without being so prodigal of your tears.” “Come and sit down with ye,” he went on. “You’re very young, lad, and maybe I’m foolish to be angry with ye that you’re not wise. But yet ye’ve more sense than your years in some respects, and I’m thinking I’ll try and make ye see things as I see ’em. I’m going to tell ye something about myself, if ye’d care to hear it.” “I’d be main pleased, Master Swift,” said Jan, earnestly. “I’d none of your advantages, lad,” said the old man. “When I was your age, I knew more mischief than you need ever know, and uncommon little else. I’m a self-educated man,—I used to hope I should live to hear folk say a self-made Great Man. It’s a bitter thing to have the ambition without the genius, to smoulder in the fire that great men shine by! However, it’s something to have just the saving sense to know that ye’ve not got it, though it’s taken a wasted lifetime to convince me, and I sometimes think the deceiving serpent is more scotched than killed yet. However, ye seem to me to be likelier to lack the ambition than the genius, so we may let that bide. But there’s a snare of mine, Jan, that I mean your feet to be free of, and that’s a mischosen vocation. I’m not a native of these parts, ye must know. I come from the north, and in those mining and manufacturing districts I’ve seen many a man that’s got an education, and could keep himself sober, rise to own his house and his works, and have men under him, and bring up his children like the gentry. For mark ye, my lad. In such matters the experiences of the early part of an artisan’s life are all so much to the good for him, for they’re in the working of the trade, and the finest young gentleman has got it all to learn, if he wants to make money in that line. I got my education, and I was sober enough, but—Heaven help me—I must be a poet, and in _that_ line a gentleman’s son knows almost from the nursery many a thing that I had to teach myself with hard labor as a man. It was just a madness.