hay and be borne triumphant with the gathered harvest of the fields. Who that has passed his early youth on the hill sides of Marsden and Diggle can ever forget the changing raptures of those early days or weary in recalling them when the brain is distraught by the turmoil of the town, and the heart turns sickening from the searing sorrows of thwarted schemes and fallen hopes.

It may seem to the reader that Tom Pinder’s workhouse life was not the life depicted by the immortal genius who told the piteous tale of a pinched and bruised Oliver asking for more. But be it remembered that all masters were not and still less are not Bumbles. The Saddleworth Workhouse in the thirties of last century had few inmates. The people on the sparsely populated hill-sides were mostly hand-loom weavers; not a few of them had a patch of land, a cow, a pig, and poultry. They were as clannish as the Scotch and when age, infirmity, or affliction overtook the declining years it was counted shame even of distant kin to suffer one of their name and blood to go to the big House. The poor then were mindful of the poor, and though the pinch of want was felt in the long winter days it went hard with folk if a neighbour’s cupboard was left bare or his grate without the mountain peat. Add to this that the master and matron were good, easy-going folk; that the Guardians knew well every inmate of the House; had perchance played truant with them in their youth and been birched by the same cane, or employed them in their prime, and, to cap all, forget not that Saddleworth was an obscure Union, scarce worth the expenditure of red-tape or the visit of an inspector.

Mr. Black did not forget his promise to see to Tom’s education. Almost before the child could lisp he was at him with the alphabet, and with his own hands designed alluring capital letters and emblematic animals so that to his dying day Tom never saw the letter D without thinking of a weaver’s donkey going “a-bunting,” or in other words, taking in his master’s warp. At six Tom could read big print, and at seven was set to read chapters of the Bible to the old grannies of the women’s side of the House; at eight he could do sums in Practice and was not afraid of Tare and Tret. But beyond this he stubbornly refused to budge. In vain Mr. Black wooed him to decline Rosa, a rose, or to conjugate Amo. Tom feigned indeed an interest he did not feel, but promptly forgot on one day all the Latin he had learned the day before. Mr. Black was fain to confess with a sigh that Tom was not bent by nature to a clerkly calling.

“Well, he’s none the worse for that,” said Mr. Redfearn, consolingly. 

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