do or to see. At home, and in the homes of his companions, the
new thrift was in vogue; he might not watch the homely cottage doings,
and listen to traditional talk about them, and look up admiringly at
able men and women engaged upon them, for the very good reason that no
such things went on. Men slaving at their gardens he might see, and
women weary at their washing and mending, amid scenes of little dignity
and much poverty and makeshift untidiness; but that was all. The
coherent and self-explanatory village life had given place to a half
blind struggle of individuals against circumstances and economic
processes which no child could possibly understand; and it was with the
pitiful stock of ideas to be derived from these conditions that the
coal-carter passed out of childhood, to enter upon the wage-earning
career which I have already outlined.

I need not spend much time in discussing that career as a source of
ideas. From first to last, and with the coal-carting period thrown in,
monotony rather than variety has been the characteristic of it. I do not
say that it has been quite fruitless. There are impressions to be
derived, and intense ones probably, from working all day against the
"face" of a gravel-pit, with the broken edge of the field up above one's
head for horizon; and from the skilled use of pick and shovel; and from
the weight of the wheelbarrow full of gravel as one wheels it along a
sagging plank. That is something to have experienced; as it is to have
sweated at night in a railway-cutting along with other men under the eye
of a ganger, and to have known starlight, or rain, or frost, or fog, or
tempest meanwhile. It is something, even, to see the life of the roads
year after year from the footboard of a coal-van, and to be in charge
of a horse hour after hour; but I am talking now of ideas which might
give buoyancy and zest to the gossip beside a man's fireside in the
evening when he is tired; and I think it unnecessary to argue that, in
regard to providing this kind of mental furniture, the coal-carter's
experience of life cannot have done great things for him. It has been
poverty-stricken just where the peasant life was so rich; it has left a
great deficiency, which could only have been made good by an education
intentionally given for that end.

But it goes almost without saying that the man's "education" did very
little to enrich his mind. The ideas and accomplishments he picked up at
the elementary