Sometimes Tom
enjoyed his music much, though he found no little fault with his mode
of playing, for Tom knew something about everything, and could render
many a reason; at other times, he preferred having Mary read to him.

On one of these latter occasions, Mary, occupied in cooking something
for the invalid, asked Joseph to read for her. He consented, but read
very badly--as if he had no understanding of the words, but, on the
other hand, stopping every few lines, apparently to think and master
what he had read. This was not good reading anyway, least of all for an
invalid who required the soothing of half-thought, molten and diluted
in sweet, even, monotonous sound, and it was long before Mary asked him
again.

Many things showed that he had had little education, and therefore
probably the more might be made of him. Mary saw that he must be what
men call a genius, for his external history had been, by his own
showing, of an altogether commonplace type.

His father, who was a blacksmith before him, and a local preacher, had
married a second time, and Joseph was the only child of the second
marriage. His father had brought him up to his own trade, and, after
his death, Joseph came to work in London, whither his sister had
preceded him. He was now thirty, and had from the first been saving
what he could of his wages in the hope of one day having a smithy of
his own, and his time more at his ordering.

Mary saw too that in his violin he possessed a grand fundamental
undeveloped education; he was like a man going about the world with a
ten-thousand-pound-note in his pocket, and not many sixpences to pay
his way with. But there was another education working in him far
deeper, and already more developed, than that which divine music even
was giving him; this also Mary thoroughly recognized; this it was in
him that chiefly attracted her; and the man himself knew it as
underlying all his consciousness.

Though he could ill read aloud, he could read well for his inward
nourishment; he could write tolerably, and, if he could not spell, that
mattered a straw, and no more; he had never read a play of
Shakespeare--had never seen a play; knew nothing of grammar or
geography--or of history, except the one history comprising all. He
knew nothing of science; but he could shoe a horse as well as any man
in the three Ridings, and make his violin talk about things far beyond
the ken of most men of science.

So much of a change ha