“I’d be main pleased, Master Swift,” said Jan, earnestly.
“I’d none of your advantages, lad,” said the old man. “When I was your age, I knew more mischief than you need ever know, and uncommon little else. I’m a self-educated man,—I used to hope I should live to hear folk say a self-made Great Man. It’s a bitter thing to have the ambition without the genius, to smoulder in the fire that great men shine by! However, it’s something to have just the saving sense to know that ye’ve not got it, though it’s taken a wasted lifetime to convince me, and I sometimes think the deceiving serpent is more scotched than killed yet. However, ye seem to me to be likelier to lack the ambition than the genius, so we may let that bide. But there’s a snare of mine, Jan, that I mean your feet to be free of, and that’s a mischosen vocation. I’m not a native of these parts, ye must know. I come from the north, and in those mining and manufacturing districts I’ve seen many a man that’s got an education, and could keep himself sober, rise to own his house and his works, and have men under him, and bring up his children like the gentry. For mark ye, my lad. In such matters the experiences of the early part of an artisan’s life are all so much to the good for him, for they’re in the working of the trade, and the finest young gentleman has got it all to learn, if he wants to make money in that line. I got my education, and I was sober enough, but—Heaven help me—I must be a poet, and in _that_ line a gentleman’s son knows almost from the nursery many a thing that I had to teach myself with hard labor as a man. It was just a madness. But I read all the poetry I could lay my hands on, and I wrote as well.”
“Did you write poetry, Master Swift?” said Jan.
“Ay, Jan, of a sort. At one time I worshipped Burns. And then I wrote verses in the dialect of my native place, which, ye must know, I can speak with any man when I’ve a mind,” said Master Swift, unconscious that he spoke it always. “And then it was Wordsworth, for the love of nature is just a passion with me, and it’s that that made the poet Keats a new world to me. Well, well, now I’m telling you how I came here. It was after my wife. She was lady’s-maid to Squire Ammaby’s mother, and the old Squire got me the school. Ah, those were happy days! I was a godless, rough sort of a fellow when she married me, but I became a converted man. And let me tell ye, lad, when a man and wife love GOD and each other, and live in the country, a bit of ground like this becomes a very garden of Eden.”
