Education she did get, by hook or by crook; there was dire pinching to pay for it, and, too well knowing this, the child strove her utmost to use the opportunities offered her.  Each morning going into Dunfield, taking with her some sandwiches that were called dinner, walking home again by tea-time, tired, hungry—­ah, hungry No matter the weather, she must walk her couple of miles—­it was at least so far to the school.  In winter you saw her set forth with her waterproof and umbrella, the too-heavy bag of books on her arm; sometimes the wind and rain beating as if to delay her—­they, too, cruel.  In summer the hot days tried her perhaps still more; she reached home in the afternoon well-nigh fainting, the books were so heavy.  Who would not have felt kindly to her?  So gentle she was, so dreadfully shy and timid, her eyes so eager, so full of unconscious pathos.  ‘Hood’s little girl,’ said the people on the way who saw her pass daily, and, however completely strangers, they said it with a certain kindness of tone and meaning.  A little thing that happened one day—­take it as an anecdote.  On her way to school she passed some boys who were pelting a most wretched dog, a poor, scraggy beast driven into a corner.  Emily, so timid usually she could not raise her eyes before a stranger, stopped, quivering all over, commanded them to cease their brutality, divine compassion become a heroism.  The boys somehow did her bidding, and walked on together.  Emily stayed behind, opened her bag, threw something for the dog to eat.  It was half her dinner.

Her mind braced itself.  She had a passionate love of learning; all books were food to her.  Fortunately there was the library of the Mechanics’ Institute; but for that she would have come short of mental sustenance, for her father had never been able to buy mole than a dozen volumes, and these all dealt with matters of physical science.  The strange things she read, books which came down to her from the shelves with a thickness of dust upon them; histories of Greece and Rome (’Not much asked for, these,’ said the librarian), translations of old classics, the Koran, Mosheim’s ‘Ecclesiastical History,’ works of Swedenborg, all the poetry she could lay hands on, novels not a few.  One day she asked for a book on ‘Gymnoblastic Hydroids’; the amazing title in the catalogue had filled her with curiosity; she must know the meaning of everything.  She was not idle, Emily.

But things in the home were going from bad to worse.  When Emily was sixteen, her father scarcely knew where to look for each day’s dinner.  Something must be done.  Activity took a twofold direction.  First of all, Emily got work as a teacher in an infant’s school.  It was at her own motion; she could bear her mother’s daily querulousness no longer; she must take some step.  She earned a mere trifle; but it was earning, instead of being a source of expense.  And in the meantime she worked on for certain examinations