He Goes to Learn a Trade. 39

 

everybody in the village, and I might have added
that everybody without exception knewhim. Hewas
a favourite—first of all, because his father was much
loved and trusted ; next, because his mother spoke
as kindly to her htisband’s poor patients as to the
richer ones; and last, because he himself spoke to
everybody with proper respect. Some of the
people, however, he knew of course better than
others. Of these Mrs Wilson we know was one.
But I believe I also mentioned that in the house in
which she lived there were other poor people. In
the room opposite to hers, on the ground-floor,
lived and worked a shoemaker—a man who had
neither wife nor child, nor, so far as people knew,
any near relative at all. He was far from being in
good health, and although he worked from morning
to night, had a constant pain in his back, which.
was rather crooked, having indeed a little hump on
it. If his temper was not always of the best, I
wonder what cleverest of watches or steam-engines
would go as well as he did with such a twist in z¢s
back? To see him seated on his low stool—in
which, by the way, as if it had not been low enough,
he sat in a leather-covered hole, perhaps for the
sake of the softness and spring of the leather—with
his head and body bent forward over his lapstone
or his last, and his right hand with the quick broad-
headed hammer hammering tip and down on a piece
of sole-leather; or with both his hands now meet-