"And, Mrs. Gradgrind," said her husband, in a lofty manner, "I should as
soon have expected to find my children reading poetry."

"Dear me!" whimpered Mrs. Gradgrind. "How can you, Louisa and Thomas? I
wonder at you. I declare you're enough to make one regret ever having
had a family at all. I have a great mind to say I wish I hadn't. _Then_
what would you have done, I should like to know? As if, with my head in
its present throbbing state, you couldn't go and look at the shells and
minerals and things provided for you, instead of circuses. I'm sure you
have enough to do if that's what you want. With my head in its present
state I couldn't remember the mere names of half the facts you have got
to attend to."

"That's the reason," pouted Louisa.

"Don't tell me that's the reason, because it can be nothing of the
sort," said Mrs. Gradgrind. "Go and be something logical directly."

Mrs. Gradgrind, not being a scientific character, usually dismissed her
children to their studies with the general injunction that they were to
choose their own pursuit.

_II.--Mr. Bounderby of Coketown_

Mr. Josiah Bounderby was as near being Mr. Gradgrind's bosom friend as a
man perfectly devoid of sentiment can be to another man perfectly devoid
of sentiment.

He was a rich man--banker, merchant, manufacturer, and what not. A big,
loud man, with a stare and a metallic laugh. A man who could never
sufficiently vaunt himself--a self-made man. A man who was always
proclaiming, through that brassy speaking-trumpet of a voice of his, his
early ignorance and poverty. A man who was the bully of humility.

He was fond of telling, was Mr. Bounderby, how he was born in a ditch,
and, abandoned by his mother, how he ran away from his grandmother, who
starved and ill-used him, and so became a vagabond. "I pulled through
it," he would say, "though nobody threw me out a rope. Vagabond,
errand-boy, labourer, porter, clerk, chief manager, small
partner--Josiah Bounderby, of Coketown."

This myth of his early life was dissipated later; and it turned out that
his mother, a respectable old woman, whom Bounderby pensioned off with
thirty pounds a year on condition she never came near him, had pinched
herself to help him out in life, and put him as apprentice to a trade.
From this apprenticeship he had steadily risen to riches.

Mr. Bounderby held strong views about the people who worked for him, the
"hands" he called them; and found, whenever the