“Bill” was a sturdy fellow, aged four-and-twenty, an excellent stone-sawyer, who could get as good wages as any man in the trade of his years; but he found a reading lesson in words of one syllable a harder matter to deal with than the hardest stone he had ever had to saw.  The letters, he complained, were so “uncommon alike, there was no tellin’ ’em one from another,” the sawyer’s business not being concerned with minute differences such as exist between a letter with its tail turned up and a letter with its tail turned down.  But Bill had a firm determination that he would learn to read, founded chiefly on two reasons:  first, that Tom Hazelow, his cousin, could read anything “right off,” whether it was print or writing, and Tom had sent him a letter from twenty miles off, saying how he was prospering in the world and had got an overlooker’s place; secondly, that Sam Phillips, who sawed with him, had learned to read when he was turned twenty, and what could be done by a little fellow like Sam Phillips, Bill considered, could be done by himself, seeing that he could pound Sam into wet clay if circumstances required it.  So here he was, pointing his big finger towards three words at once, and turning his head on one side that he might keep better hold with his eye of the one word which was to be discriminated out of the group.  The amount of knowledge Bartle Massey must possess was something so dim and vast that Bill’s imagination recoiled before it:  he would hardly have ventured to deny that the schoolmaster might have something to do in bringing about the regular return of daylight and the changes in the weather.

The man seated next to Bill was of a very different type:  he was a Methodist brickmaker who, after spending thirty years of his life in perfect satisfaction with his ignorance, had lately “got religion,” and along with it the desire to read the Bible.  But with him, too, learning was a heavy business, and on his way out to-night he had offered as usual a special prayer for help, seeing that he had undertaken this hard task with a single eye to the nourishment of his soul—­that he might have a greater abundance of texts and hymns wherewith to banish evil memories and the temptations of old habit—­or, in brief language, the devil.  For the brickmaker had been a notorious poacher, and was suspected, though there was no good evidence against him, of being the man who had shot a neighbouring gamekeeper in the leg.  However that might be, it is certain that shortly after the accident referred to, which was coincident with the arrival of an awakening Methodist preacher at Treddleston, a great change had been observed in the brickmaker; and though he was still known in the neighbourhood by his old sobriquet of “Brimstone,” there was nothing he held in so much horror as any further transactions with that evil-smelling element.  He was a broad-chested fellow with a fervid temperament, which helped him better in imbibing religious ideas than in the dry process of acquiring the mere human knowledge of the alphabet.  Indeed, he had been already a little shaken in his resolution by a brother Methodist, who assured him that the letter was a mere obstruction to the Spirit, and expressed a fear that Brimstone was too eager for the knowledge that puffeth up.