The third beginner was a much more promising pupil.  He was a tall but thin and wiry man, nearly as old as Brimstone, with a very pale face and hands stained a deep blue.  He was a dyer, who in the course of dipping homespun wool and old women’s petticoats had got fired with the ambition to learn a great deal more about the strange secrets of colour.  He had already a high reputation in the district for his dyes, and he was bent on discovering some method by which he could reduce the expense of crimsons and scarlets.  The druggist at Treddleston had given him a notion that he might save himself a great deal of labour and expense if he could learn to read, and so he had begun to give his spare hours to the night-school, resolving that his “little chap” should lose no time in coming to Mr. Massey’s day-school as soon as he was old enough.

It was touching to see these three big men, with the marks of their hard labour about them, anxiously bending over the worn books and painfully making out, “The grass is green,” “The sticks are dry,” “The corn is ripe”—­a very hard lesson to pass to after columns of single words all alike except in the first letter.  It was almost as if three rough animals were making humble efforts to learn how they might become human.  And it touched the tenderest fibre in Bartle Massey’s nature, for such full-grown children as these were the only pupils for whom he had no severe epithets and no impatient tones.  He was not gifted with an imperturbable temper, and on music-nights it was apparent that patience could never be an easy virtue to him; but this evening, as he glances over his spectacles at Bill Downes, the sawyer, who is turning his head on one side with a desperate sense of blankness before the letters d-r-y, his eyes shed their mildest and most encouraging light.

After the reading class, two youths between sixteen and nineteen came up with the imaginary bills of parcels, which they had been writing out on their slates and were now required to calculate “off-hand”—­a test which they stood with such imperfect success that Bartle Massey, whose eyes had been glaring at them ominously through his spectacles for some minutes, at length burst out in a bitter, high-pitched tone, pausing between every sentence to rap the floor with a knobbed stick which rested between his legs.

“Now, you see, you don’t do this thing a bit better than you did a fortnight ago, and I’ll tell you what’s the reason.  You want to learn accounts—­that’s well and good.  But you think all you need do to learn accounts is to come to me and do sums for an hour or so, two or three times a-week; and no sooner do you get your caps on and turn out of doors again than you sweep the whole thing clean out of your mind.  You go whistling about, and take no more care what you’re thinking of than if your heads were gutters for any rubbish to swill through that happened to be in the way; and if you get a good notion in ’em, it’s