The tinker was seated under a hedge, hammering away at an old kettle, with a little fire burning in front of him, and the donkey hard by, indulging in a placid doze. Mr. Sprott looked up as Lenny passed, nodded kindly, and said,—
“Good evenin’, Lenny: glad to hear you be so ‘spectably sitivated with Mounseer.”
“Ay,” answered Lenny, with a leaven of rancour in his recollections, “you’re not ashamed to speak to me now that I am not in disgrace. But it was in disgrace, when it wasn’t my fault, that the real gentleman was most kind to me.”
“Ar-r, Lenny,” said the tinker, with a prolonged rattle in that said Ar-r, which was not without great significance. “But you sees the real gentleman, who han’t got his bread to get, can hafford to ‘spise his c’racter in the world. A poor tinker must be timbersome and nice in his ‘sociations. But sit down here a bit, Lenny; I’ve summat to say to ye!”
“To me?”
“To ye. Give the neddy a shove out i’ the vay, and sit down, I say.”
Lenny rather reluctantly, and somewhat superciliously, accepted this invitation.
“I hears,” said the tinker, in a voice made rather indistinct by a couple of nails, which he had inserted between his teeth,—“I hears as how you be unkimmon fond of reading. I ha’ sum nice cheap books in my bag yonder,—sum as low as a penny.”
“I should like to see them,” said Lenny, his eyes sparkling.
The tinker rose, opened one of the panniers on the ass’s back, took out a bag, which he placed before Lenny, and told him to suit himself. The young peasant desired no better. He spread all the contents of the bag on the sward, and a motley collection of food for the mind was there,—food and poison, serpentes avibus good and evil. Here Milton’s Paradise Lost, there “The Age of Reason;” here Methodist Tracts, there “True Principles of Socialism,”—Treatises on Useful Knowledge by sound learning actuated by pure benevolence, Appeals to Operatives by the shallowest reasoners, instigated by the same ambition that had moved Eratosthenes to the conflagration of a temple; works of fiction admirable as “Robinson Crusoe,” or innocent as “The Old English Baron,” beside coarse translations of such garbage as had rotted away the youth of France under Louis Quinze. This miscellany was an epitome, in short, of the mixed World of Books, of that vast city of the Press, with its palaces and hovels, its aqueducts and sewers, which opens all alike to the naked eye and the curious mind of him to whom you say, in the tinker’s careless phrase, “Suit yourself.”
But it is not the first impulse of a nature healthful and still pure to settle in the hovel and lose itself amidst the sewers; and Lenny Fairfield turned innocently over the bad books, and selecting two or three of the best, brought them to the tinker, and asked the price.
“Why,” said Mr. Sprott, putting on his spectacles, “you has taken the werry dearest: them ‘ere be much cheaper, and more hinterestin’.”
“But I don’t fancy them,” answered Lenny; “I don’t understand what they are about, and this seems to tell one how the steam-engine is made, and has nice plates; and this is ‘Robinson Crusoe,’ which Parson Dale once said he would give me—I’d rather buy it out of my own money.”
“Well, please yourself,” quoth the tinker; “you shall have the books for four bob, and you can pay me next month.”
“Four bobs, four shillings? it is a great sum,” said Lenny; “but I will lay by, as you are kind enough to trust me: good-evening, Mr. Sprott.”
“Stay a bit,” said the tinker; “I’ll just throw you these two little tracts into the bargain; they be only a shilling a dozen, so ‘t is but tuppence,—and ven you has read those, vy, you’ll be a regular customer.”
The tinker tossed to Lenny Nos. 1 and 2 of “Appeals to Operatives,” and the peasant took them up gratefully.
The young knowledge-seeker went his way across the green fields, and under the still autumn foliage of the hedgerows. He looked first at one book, then at another; he did not know on which to settle.
The tinker rose, and made a fire with leaves and furze and sticks, some dry and some green.
Lenny has now opened No. 1 of the tracts: they are the shortest to read, and don’t require so much effort of the mind as the explanation of the steam-engine.
The tinker has set on his grimy glue-pot, and the glue simmers.
All books are sourced from Project Gutenberg