“So it will go on, worsening and worsening,” thought Adam; “there’s no slipping uphill again, and no standing still when once you ’ve begun to slip down.”  And then the day came back to him when he was a little fellow and used to run by his father’s side, proud to be taken out to work, and prouder still to hear his father boasting to his fellow-workmen how “the little chap had an uncommon notion o’ carpentering.”  What a fine active fellow his father was then!  When people asked Adam whose little lad he was, he had a sense of distinction as he answered, “I’m Thias Bede’s lad.”  He was quite sure everybody knew Thias Bede—­didn’t he make the wonderful pigeon-house at Broxton parsonage?  Those were happy days, especially when Seth, who was three years the younger, began to go out working too, and Adam began to be a teacher as well as a learner.  But then came the days of sadness, when Adam was someway on in his teens, and Thias began to loiter at the public-houses, and Lisbeth began to cry at home, and to pour forth her plaints in the hearing of her sons.  Adam remembered well the night of shame and anguish when he first saw his father quite wild and foolish, shouting a song out fitfully among his drunken companions at the “Waggon Overthrown.”  He had run away once when he was only eighteen, making his escape in the morning twilight with a little blue bundle over his shoulder, and his “mensuration book” in his pocket, and saying to himself very decidedly that he could bear the vexations of home no longer—­he would go and seek his fortune, setting up his stick at the crossways and bending his steps the way it fell.  But by the time he got to Stoniton, the thought of his mother and Seth, left behind to endure everything without him, became too importunate, and his resolution failed him.  He came back the next day, but the misery and terror his mother had gone through in those two days had haunted her ever since.

“No!” Adam said to himself to-night, “that must never happen again.  It ’ud make a poor balance when my doings are cast up at the last, if my poor old mother stood o’ the wrong side.  My back’s broad enough and strong enough; I should be no better than a coward to go away and leave the troubles to be borne by them as aren’t half so able.  ’They that are strong ought to bear the infirmities of those that are weak, and not to please themselves.’  There’s a text wants no candle to show’t; it shines by its own light.  It’s plain enough you get into the wrong road i’ this life if you run after this and that only for the sake o’ making things easy and pleasant to yourself.  A pig may poke his nose into the trough and think o’ nothing outside it; but if you’ve got a man’s heart and soul in you, you can’t be easy a-making your own bed an’ leaving the rest to lie on the stones.  Nay, nay, I’ll never slip my neck out o’ the yoke, and leave the load to be drawn by the weak uns.  Father’s a sore cross to me, an’s likely to be for many a long year to come.  What then?  I’ve got th’ health, and the limbs, and the sperrit to bear it.”