hour or so, two or three
times a-week; and no sooner do you get your caps on and turn out of
doors again than you sweep the whole thing clean out of your mind. You
go whistling about, and take no more care what you're thinking of
than if your heads were gutters for any rubbish to swill through that
happened to be in the way; and if you get a good notion in 'em,
it's pretty soon washed out again. You think knowledge is to be got
cheap--you'll come and pay Bartle Massey sixpence a-week, and he'll make
you clever at figures without your taking any trouble. But knowledge
isn't to be got with paying sixpence, let me tell you. If you're to know
figures, you must turn 'em over in your heads and keep your thoughts
fixed on 'em. There's nothing you can't turn into a sum, for there's
nothing but what's got number in it--even a fool. You may say to
yourselves, 'I'm one fool, and Jack's another; if my fool's head weighed
four pound, and Jack's three pound three ounces and three quarters, how
many pennyweights heavier would my head be than Jack's?' A man that had
got his heart in learning figures would make sums for himself and work
'em in his head. When he sat at his shoemaking, he'd count his stitches
by fives, and then put a price on his stitches, say half a farthing, and
then see how much money he could get in an hour; and then ask himself
how much money he'd get in a day at that rate; and then how much ten
workmen would get working three, or twenty, or a hundred years at that
rate--and all the while his needle would be going just as fast as if
he left his head empty for the devil to dance in. But the long and the
short of it is--I'll have nobody in my night-school that doesn't strive
to learn what he comes to learn, as hard as if he was striving to get
out of a dark hole into broad daylight. I'll send no man away because
he's stupid: if Billy Taft, the idiot, wanted to learn anything, I'd not
refuse to teach him. But I'll not throw away good knowledge on people
who think they can get it by the sixpenn'orth, and carry it away with
'em as they would an ounce of snuff. So never come to me again, if you
can't show that you've been working with your own heads, instead of
thinking that you can pay for mine to work for you. That's the last word
I've got to say to you."

With this final sentence, Bartle Massey gave a sharper rap than ever
with his knobbed stick, and the discomfited lads got up to go with a
sulky look. The other pupils