ing into the toils of
some rapacious task-master, becomes an enslaved _sweater_. For one
workman injured by neglect of his school-education, there are scores
ruined by neglect of their apprenticeship-education. Three-fourths of
the distress of the country's mechanics (of course not reckoning that of
the unhappy class who have to compete with machinery), and nine-tenths
of their vagabondism, will be found restricted to inferior workmen, who,
like Hogarth's "careless apprentice," neglected the opportunities of
their second term of education. The sagacious painter had a truer
insight into this matter than most of our modern educationists.

My friend of the Doocot Cave had been serving a short apprenticeship to
a grocer in London during the latter years in which I had been working
out mine as a stone-mason in the north country; and I now learned that
he had just returned to his native place, with the intention of setting
up in business for himself. To those who move in the upper walks, the
superiority in status of the village shop-keeper over the journeyman
mason may not be very perceptible; but, surveyed from the lower levels
of society, it is quite considerable enough to be seen; even Gulliver
could determine that the Emperor of Lilliput was taller by almost the
breadth of a nail than any of his Court; and, though extremely desirous
of renewing my acquaintanceship with my old friend, I was sensible
enough of his advantage over me in point of position, to feel that the
necessary advances should be made on his part, not on mine. I, however,
threw myself in his way, though after a manner so fastidiously proud and
jealous, that even yet, every time the recollection crosses me, it
provokes me to a smile. On learning that he was engaged at the quay in
superintending the landing of some goods, for, I suppose, his future
shop, I assumed the leathern apron, which I had thrown aside for the
winter at Martinmas, and stalked past him in my working dress--a
veritable operative mason--eyeing him steadfastly as I passed. He looked
at me for a moment; and then, without sign of recognition, turned
indifferently away. I failed taking into account that he had never seen
me girt with a leathern apron before--that, since we had last parted, I
had grown more than half a foot--and that a young man of nearly five
feet eleven inches, with an incipient whisker palpably visible on his
cheek, might be a different-looking sort of person from a smooth-