clared itself with
severity, and not many years had passed over his head before he would
have travelled thirty miles to address an infant school. He was no
student; his reading was confined to elementary text-books and the daily
papers; he did not even fly as high as cyclopaedias; life, he would say,
was his volume. His lectures were not meant, he would declare, for
college professors; they were addressed direct to "the great heart of
the people," and the heart of the people must certainly be sounder than
its head, for his lucubrations were received with favour. That entitled,
"How to Live Cheerfully on Forty Pounds a Year," created a sensation
among the unemployed. "Education: Its Aims, Objects, Purposes, and
Desirability," gained him the respect of the shallow-minded. As for his
celebrated essay on "Life Insurance Regarded in its Relation to the
Masses," read before the Working Men's Mutual Improvement Society, Isle
of Dogs, it was received with a "literal ovation" by an unintelligent
audience of both sexes, and so marked was the effect that he was next
year elected honorary president of the institution, an office of less
than no emolument--since the holder was expected to come down with a
donation--but one which highly satisfied his self-esteem.

While Joseph was thus building himself up a reputation among the more
cultivated portion of the ignorant, his domestic life was suddenly
overwhelmed by orphans. The death of his younger brother Jacob saddled
him with the charge of two boys, Morris and John; and in the course of
the same year his family was still further swelled by the addition of a
little girl, the daughter of John Henry Hazeltine, Esq., a gentleman of
small property and fewer friends. He had met Joseph only once, at a
lecture-hall in Holloway; but from that formative experience he returned
home to make a new will, and consign his daughter and her fortune to the
lecturer. Joseph had a kindly disposition; and yet it was not without
reluctance that he accepted this new responsibility, advertised for a
nurse, and purchased a second-hand perambulator. Morris and John he made
more readily welcome; not so much because of the tie of consanguinity as
because the leather business (in which he hastened to invest their
fortune of thirty thousand pounds) had recently exhibited inexplicable
symptoms of decline. A young but capable Scot was chosen as manager to
the enterprise, and the cares of business never again afflicte