'There's iron, they say, in all our blood,

And a grain or two perhaps is good;

But his, he makes me harshly feel,

Has got a little too much of steel.'

ANON.

'Margaret!' said Mr. Hale, as he returned from showing his guest

downstairs; 'I could not help watching your face with some

anxiety, when Mr. Thornton made his confession of having been a

shop-boy. I knew it all along from Mr. Bell; so I was aware of

what was coming; but I half expected to see you get up and leave

the room.'

'Oh, papa! you don't mean that you thought me so silly? I really

liked that account of himself better than anything else he said.

Everything else revolted me, from its hardness; but he spoke

about himself so simply--with so little of the pretence that

makes the vulgarity of shop-people, and with such tender respect

for his mother, that I was less likely to leave the room then

than when he was boasting about Milton, as if there was not such

another place in the world; or quietly professing to despise

people for careless, wasteful improvidence, without ever seeming

to think it his duty to try to make them different,--to give them

anything of the training which his mother gave him, and to which

he evidently owes his position, whatever that may be. No! his

statement of having been a shop-boy was the thing I liked best of

all.'

'I am surprised at you, Margaret,' said her mother. 'You who were

always accusing people of being shoppy at Helstone! I don't I

think, Mr. Hale, you have done quite right in introducing such a

person to us without telling us what he had been. I really was

very much afraid of showing him how much shocked I was at some

parts of what he said. His father "dying in miserable

circumstances." Why it might have been in the workhouse.'

'I am not sure if it was not worse than being in the workhouse,'

replied her husband. 'I heard a good deal of his previous life

from Mr. Bell before we came here; and as he has told you a part,

I will fill up what he left out. His father speculated wildly,

failed, and then killed himself, because he could not bear the

disgrace. All his former friends shrunk from the disclosures that

had to be made of his dishonest gambling--wild, hopeless

struggles, made with other people's money, to regain his own

moderate portion of wealth. No one came forwards to help the

mother and this boy. There was another child, I believe, a girl;

too young to earn money, but of course she had to be kept. At

least, no friend came forwards immediately, and Mrs. Thornton is

not one, I fancy, to wait till tardy kindness comes to find her

out. So they left Milton. I knew he had gone into a shop, and

that his earnings, with some fragment of property secured to his

mother, had been made to keep them for a long time. Mr. Bell said

they absolutely lived upon water-porridge for years--how, he did

not know; but long after the creditors had given up hope of any

payment of old Mr. Thornton's debts (if, indeed, they ever had

hoped at all about it, after his suicide,) this young man

returned to Milton, and went quietly round to each creditor,

paying him the first instalment of the money owing to him. No

noise--no gathering together of creditors--it was done very

silently and quietly, but all was paid at last; helped on

materially by the circumstance of one of the creditors, a crabbed

old fellow (Mr. Bell says), taking in Mr. Thornton as a kind of

partner.' 'That really is fine,' said Margaret. 'What a pity such a nature

should be tainted by his position as a Milton manufacturer.'




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