'Because, sir, I don't like wood-carving, and I feel I could do a great deal better at marble.'

Mr. Begg gazed up at him (he was a little man and Colin was tall) in utter surprise and hesitation. 'You're not mad, are you, Churchill?' he inquired cautiously. 'You're not mad, are you?'

'No, sir,' Colin replied stoutly; 'but I think I must have been when I signed them indentures.'

The cabinet-maker went into his little office, called Colin in, and then sat down in a dazed manner to hear this strange thing out to its final termination. Colin burst forth, then, with his impassioned pleading, astonishing himself by the flood of native eloquence with which he entreated Mr. Begg to release him from that horrid wood-carving, and let him follow his natural calling as a sculptor in clay and marble. He didn't know what he was doing when he signed the indentures; he had only just come fresh from his life as a servant. Now he knew he had the makings of a sculptor in him, and a sculptor alone he wished to be. Mr. Begg regarded him askance all the time, as a man might regard a stray dog of doubtful sanity, but said never a single word, for good or for evil. When Colin had worn himself out with argument and exhortation, the cabinet-maker rose from his high seat, unlocked his desk mechanically, and took out of it his copy of Colin's indentures. He read them all through carefully to himself, and then he laid them down with the puzzled air of one who meets for the first time in his life with some inexplicable practical enigma. 'This is very strange, Churchill,' he muttered, coolly, half to himself; 'this is really most remarkable. There's no mistake or flaw of any sort in those indentures; nothing on earth to invalidate 'em or throw doubt upon them in any way. Your signature's there as clear as daylight. I can't understand it. You've always been a good workman—the best apprentice, take you all round, I've ever 'ad 'ere; and Canon Melville, he's praised your carving most uncommonly, and so they all do. A good, honest-working, industrious lad I've always found you, one time with another; not such a great eater neither; and I was very well satisfied altogether with you till this very evening. And now you come and say you want to cancel your indentures, and go to the stone-cutting! Never heard anything so remarkable in all my life! Why, you're worth more than a hundred pounds to me! I couldn't let you go, not if you was to pay me for it.'

Poor Colin! how he wished at that moment that he had been idle, careless, voracious and good-for-nothing! His very virtues, it seemed, were turning against him. He had thrown himself so heartily into the wood-carving at first that his master had found him worth half a dozen common apprentices. He fumbled in his pocket nervously at little Minna's poor nine shillings which he had changed that very morning from her post-office order.

'Can't you understand, Mr. Begg,' he said at last, despairingly, 'that a fellow may change his mind? He may feel he can do one thing a great deal better than another, and he may have a longing to do that thing and nothing else, because he loves it?'

Mr. Begg gazed at him stolidly. 'Cabinetmaking's a very good trade,' he said in his dull methodical bourgeois tone; 'and so, no doubt, 's stone-cutting. But these indentures 'ere bind you down to the cabinet-making, Churchill, and not to the sculpture business.

There's your signature to 'em; and you've got to stick to it. So that's the long and the short of it.'

'But it's not the end of it,' Colin answered in his most stubborn voice (and your Dorsetshire man can be very stubborn indeed when he pleases): 'if you don't let me off my indentures as I ask you, you'll have to put up in future with what you can get out of me.'

Next morning, when it was time to begin work, Colin marched as usual into the workshop, and took up a gouge as if to continue carving the panel on which he was engaged. But instead of doing anything to the purpose, he merely kept on chipping off small splinters of wood in an aimless fashion for half an hour. After a time, Mr. Begg observed him, and came up to see what he was doing, but said nothing. All through the day Cohn went on in the same manner, and from time to time Mr. Begg looked in and found the work no further advanced than it had been last evening; still, he said nothing. When the time came to shut up the shop, Mr. Begg looked at him sternly, but only uttered a single sentence: 'We shall have the law of you, Churchill; we shall have the law of you.'