“He carried many a heavy load for me, though, when I was in my former hard place, and it’s a pity he is such a bad boy in some things,” thought Richard, as he trudged on. He left the books, offering to do any thing else he could, at his master’s, and felt all the anticipations of “home” more delightfully than ever, when he saw the candle-light glimmering through the chinks of his mother’s shutter. The tiny room seemed to him a paradise. The widow had finished her embroidery and was netting, so her eyes did not look as strained and weary as usual. There was something simmering and smelling very savory on the fire; but Richard put back his hand to pull out his piece of beef. It was gone!
Richard had no doubt that his quandam “friend” had picked his pocket, more in fun than malice; and he was confirmed in the idea, by seeing a boy’s shadow on the wall of the opposite houses—Ned, doubtless, waiting to see how he bore his disappointment. His first impulse was to run out and thrash the thief; but the memory of their nodding companionship, and of the loads the unfortunate lad had carried for him twice or thrice—running off with what Richard had staggered under—harmonized by the perfume of the pot au feu, taught him forbearance, and the evening passed, as the widow said, “full of hope.” Many such succeeded. Richard well satisfied his master, although he was a reserved, peculiar man, not much known, and less liked; he frequented no public places, and kept little society, spending his evenings in making up his accounts, arranging his books, and reading. Matty had often told her confidential friend, the milk-woman, that “one might as well live in the house with a corpse,” adding her belief “that all would be corpses one day, for certain; and the sooner she was one the pleasanter it would be for herself, only that, being a lone woman, she thought while people had the holy breath of life in their bodies they might as well be alive—that was all.”
Richard had numbered more than fourteen years when he entered Mr. Whitelock’s service. He managed to keep on speaking terms with Matty, for when she would not talk to him she talked at him. He frequently remained half an hour after all was shut up to read to her; and once when Mr. Whitelock called to her to inquire who was below, she answered, in a tone of fierce indignation, that it was only the “State of Europe, the French at another revulsion, and Spain on the top of the Pyramids.”
Richard’s life passed very happily: he was gaining knowledge, he was assisting his beloved mother, he was inhaling the atmosphere of all others he most enjoyed. He had permission to take home any book at night, provided he brought it in the morning; at first, he greedily devoured all that came in his way, but the reading-stock of a third class library was not likely to feed a mind eager for actual knowledge, and largely comprehensive. Poetry he imbibed fervently; but whenever he could get biography or scientific books, he dispensed with the luxury of sleep, and came with pale cheeks and haggard eyes to his employment in the morning. Sandford and Merton, with its bright lessons of practical independence, was his favorite relaxation, and frequently, as he told his mother, “he took a plunge” into Franklin’s life as a refreshment. Then he wrote copies upon stray slips of paper; worked sums and problems on a rough piece of common slate; read what he most admired to his mother, though he was often grieved that her enthusiasm did not keep pace with his, and that she had little relish for any thing that “had not hope in it.” Then she would insist on his going to rest, when he was all eagerness to finish a book or unravel a mystery—not the transparent mystery of a novel, but the mystery of some mighty worker in the business of life; some giant amongst men, who achieved greatness though born in obscurity; some artist, whose fame towered toward the heavens, like the tree produced by the grain of mustard-seed; some Lancaster, or Washington, or Howard, or Watt, or humble, benevolent Wilderspin, revolutionizing sloth into activity, touching the eyes of multitudes with a magic wand, so that they cried out as one man. Behold, we see!—electrifying nations, calling into existence the dormant powers and sympathies of nature and of art.
Often his eyes refused to slumber or sleep, when, in obedience to the gentle request which love turned into a command, he lay down, beneath the shadow of his mother’s blessing; and his brain would throb, and his heart beat; and when she slept, he would creep from his humble pallet and read by the light of the one lamp which illumined the court, and was (so he thought) fortunately placed opposite their window. Not that the boy understood all he read, but he imbibed its influence, and clasping his large brow within his palms, he would weigh and consider, and feel, within that narrow room, where poverty still lingered—though then, with their simple and few wants, rather as a shadow than a substance—and his heart throbbing as he thought, “What shall I do to be great?” even, it might have been, when the chastened and subdued spirit of his young but almost sightless mother murmured in her half-broken sleep, “What shall I do to be saved?” And then, as the spring advanced, and night and morning blended sweetly together, he hastened to his work joyfully—for he loved the labor that gave him food and knowledge. Matty would say his “food went into an ill skin—never did credit to man or mortial;” while his silent master, absorbed in his occupations, and pretty much abstracted from the every-day goings-on of his establishment—having, as he said of himself, an honest curse of a housekeeper and a jewel of a boy—was, nevertheless, sometimes startled by the singular questions Richard asked, meekly and modestly seeking for information, from him whom his enthusiastic nature believed one of the mild lights of literature.
What will youths who are pampered or wooed into learning say of the circulating boy of a circulating library, performing the menial offices of his station, yet working his mind ardently and steadily onward?
One evening, after he had gone out with his books, his mother entered the shop, timidly and with hesitating step, which those who struggle against blindness unconsciously assume. Matty was there, removing some papers; Peter, the most silent of all dogs, lay upon the mat, and Mrs. Dolland stumbled over him: Peter only gave vent to a stifled remonstrance, but that was enough to set Matty into a passion.
“Couldn’t you see the dog!” she exclaimed. “If you war a customer tin times over, you had no call to the baste; he’s neither pens, ink, wafers, books, nor blotting-paper—no, nor the writer of a book—to be trampled under your feet.”
“I did not see him,” she said meekly.
“Can’t you use your eyes?”