“I don’t say what I believe or what I
don’t believe. The flamin’ iron as
I’ve had to do with, has both kep’ me out
o’ knowledge, an’ led me into knowledge!
I’ll turn the tale over again! You see,
lad, when I was a boy, I thought everything my mother
said and my father did, old-fashioned, and a bit ignorant-like;
but when I was a man, I saw that, if I had started
right off from where they set me down, I would ha’
been farther ahead. To honour your father an’
mother don’t mean to stick by their chimbley-corner
all your life, but to start from their front door and
go foret. I went by the back door, like the fool
I was, to get into the front road, and had a long
round to make.”
“I shan’t do so with my father. He
don’t read much, but he thinks. He’s
got a head, my father!”
“There was fathers afore yours, lad! You
needn’t scorn yer gran’ther for your father!”
“Scorn you, grandfather! God forbid!—or,
at least,—”
“You don’t see what I’m drivin’
at, sonny!—When an old tale comes to me
from the far-away time, I don’t pitch it into
the road, any more’n I would an old key or an
old shoe—a horse-shoe, I mean: it was
something once, and it may be something again!
I hang the one up, and turn the other over. An’
if you be strong set on throwin’ either away,
lad, I misdoubt me you an’ me won’t blaze
together like one flamin’ sword!”
Richard held his peace. The old man had already
somehow impressed him. If he had not, like his
father, bid good-bye to superstition, there was in
him a power that was not in his father—a
power like that he found in his favourite books.
“Mind what he says, and do what he tells you,
and you’ll get on splendid!” his mother
had said as he came away.
“Don’t be afraid of him, but speak up:
he’ll like you the better for it,” his
father had counselled. “I should never have
married your mother if I’d been afraid of him.”
Richard, trying to follow both counsels, got on with
his grandfather better than fairly.
COMPARISONS.
All things belong to every man who yields his selfishness,
which is his one impoverishment, and draws near to
his wealth, which is humanity—not humanity
in the abstract, but the humanity of friends and neighbours
and all men. Selfishness, I repeat, whether in
the form of vanity or greed, is our poverty.
John Tuke, being a clever man without a spark of genius,
worshipped faculty as he called it—worshipped
it where he was most familiar with it—that
is, in his own mind and its operations, in his own
hands and their handiwork. His natural atmosphere,
however, was, happily, goodwill and kindliness:
else the scorn of helplessness which sprang from his
worship, would have supplied the other pole to his
selfishness.
