Chapter 2 — Chapter 2

‘My mother left me to my grandmother,’ said
Bounderby; ‘and, according to the best of my remembrance,
my grandmother was the wickedest and the worst old woman that
ever lived.  If I got a little pair of shoes by any chance,
she would take ’em off and sell ’em for drink. 
Why, I have known that grandmother of mine lie in her bed and
drink her four-teen glasses of liquor before
breakfast!’

Mrs. Gradgrind, weakly smiling, and giving no other sign of
vitality, looked (as she always did) like an indifferently
executed transparency of a small female figure, without enough
light behind it.

‘She kept a chandler’s shop,’ pursued
Bounderby, ‘and kept me in an egg-box.  That was the
cot of my infancy; an old egg-box.  As soon as I was
big enough to run away, of course I ran away.  Then I became
a young vagabond; and instead of one old woman knocking me about
and starving me, everybody of all ages knocked me about and
starved me.  They were right; they had no business to do
anything else.  I was a nuisance, an incumbrance, and a
pest.  I know that very well.’

my

His pride in having at any time of his life achieved such a
great social distinction as to be a nuisance, an incumbrance, and
a pest, was only to be satisfied by three sonorous repetitions of
the boast.

‘I was to pull through it, I suppose, Mrs.
Gradgrind.  Whether I was to do it or not, ma’am, I
did it.  I pulled through it, though nobody threw me out a
rope.  Vagabond, errand-boy, vagabond, labourer, porter,
clerk, chief manager, small partner, Josiah Bounderby of
Coketown.  Those are the antecedents, and the
culmination.  Josiah Bounderby of Coketown learnt his
letters from the outsides of the shops, Mrs. Gradgrind, and was
first able to tell the time upon a dial-plate, from studying the
steeple clock of St. Giles’s Church, London, under the
direction of a drunken cripple, who was a convicted thief, and an
incorrigible vagrant.  Tell Josiah Bounderby of Coketown, of
your district schools and your model schools, and your training
schools, and your whole kettle-of-fish of schools; and Josiah
Bounderby of Coketown, tells you plainly, all right, all
correct—he hadn’t such advantages—but let us
have hard-headed, solid-fisted people—the education that
made him won’t do for everybody, he knows well—such
and such his education was, however, and you may force him to
swallow boiling fat, but you shall never force him to suppress
the facts of his life.’

Being heated when he arrived at this climax, Josiah Bounderby
of Coketown stopped.  He stopped just as his eminently
practical friend, still accompanied by the two young culprits,
entered the room.  His eminently practical friend, on seeing
him, stopped also, and gave Louisa a reproachful look that
plainly said, ‘Behold your Bounderby!’

‘Well!’ blustered Mr. Bounderby,
‘what’s the matter?  What is young Thomas in the
dumps about?’

He spoke of young Thomas, but he looked at Louisa.

‘We were peeping at the circus,’ muttered Louisa,
haughtily, without lifting up her eyes, ‘and father caught
us.’

‘And, Mrs. Gradgrind,’ said her husband in a lofty
manner, ‘I should as soon have expected to find my children
reading poetry.’

‘Dear me,’ whimpered Mrs. Gradgrind. 
‘How can you, Louisa and Thomas!  I wonder at
you.  I declare you’re enough to make one regret ever
having had a family at all.  I have a great mind to say I
wish I hadn’t.  Then what would you have done,
I should like to know?’

Then

Mr. Gradgrind did not seem favourably impressed by these
cogent remarks.  He frowned impatiently.

‘As if, with my head in its present throbbing state, you
couldn’t go and look at the shells and minerals and things
provided for you, instead of circuses!’ said Mrs.
Gradgrind.  ‘You know, as well as I do, no young
people have circus masters, or keep circuses in cabinets, or
attend lectures about circuses.  What can you possibly want
to know of circuses then?  I am sure you have enough to do,
if that’s what you want.  With my head in its present
state, I couldn’t remember the mere names of half the facts
you have got to attend to.’

‘That’s the reason!’ pouted Louisa.

‘Don’t tell me that’s the reason, because it
can’t be nothing of the sort,’ said Mrs.
Gradgrind.  ‘Go and be somethingological
directly.’  Mrs. Gradgrind was not a scientific
character, and usually dismissed her children to their studies
with this general injunction to choose their pursuit.

In truth, Mrs. Gradgrind’s stock of facts in general was
woefully defective; but Mr. Gradgrind in raising her to her high
matrimonial position, had been influenced by two reasons. 
Firstly, she was most satisfactory as a question of figures; and,
secondly, she had ‘no nonsense’ about her.  By
nonsense he meant fancy; and truly it is probable she was as free
from any alloy of that nature, as any human being not arrived at
the perfection of an absolute idiot, ever was.

The simple circumstance of being left alone with her husband
and Mr. Bounderby, was sufficient to stun this admirable lady
again without collision between herself and any other fact. 
So, she once more died away, and nobody minded her.

‘Bounderby,’ said Mr. Gradgrind, drawing a chair
to the fireside, ‘you are always so interested in my young
people—particularly in Louisa—that I make no apology
for saying to you, I am very much vexed by this discovery. 
I have systematically devoted myself (as you know) to the
education of the reason of my family.  The reason is (as you
know) the only faculty to which education should be
addressed.  ‘And yet, Bounderby, it would appear from
this unexpected circumstance of to-day, though in itself a
trifling one, as if something had crept into Thomas’s and
Louisa’s minds which is—or rather, which is
not—I don’t know that I can express myself better
than by saying—which has never been intended to be
developed, and in which their reason has no part.’

‘There certainly is no reason in looking with interest
at a parcel of vagabonds,’ returned Bounderby. 
‘When I was a vagabond myself, nobody looked with any
interest at me; I know that.’

me

‘Then comes the question; said the eminently practical
father, with his eyes on the fire, ‘in what has this vulgar
curiosity its rise?’

‘I’ll tell you in what.  In idle
imagination.’

‘I hope not,’ said the eminently practical;
‘I confess, however, that the misgiving has crossed
me on my way home.’

has

‘In idle imagination, Gradgrind,’ repeated
Bounderby.  ‘A very bad thing for anybody, but a
cursed bad thing for a girl like Louisa.  I should ask Mrs.
Gradgrind’s pardon for strong expressions, but that she
knows very well I am not a refined character.  Whoever
expects refinement in me will be disappointed.  I
hadn’t a refined bringing up.’

me

‘Whether,’ said Gradgrind, pondering with his
hands in his pockets, and his cavernous eyes on the fire,
‘whether any instructor or servant can have suggested
anything?  Whether Louisa or Thomas can have been reading
anything?  Whether, in spite of all precautions, any idle
story-book can have got into the house?  Because, in minds
that have been practically formed by rule and line, from the
cradle upwards, this is so curious, so
incomprehensible.’

‘Stop a bit!’ cried Bounderby, who all this time
had been standing, as before, on the hearth, bursting at the very
furniture of the room with explosive humility.  ‘You
have one of those strollers’ children in the
school.’

‘Cecilia Jupe, by name,’ said Mr. Gradgrind, with
something of a stricken look at his friend.

‘Now, stop a bit!’ cried Bounderby again. 
‘How did she come there?’

‘Why, the fact is, I saw the girl myself, for the first
time, only just now.  She specially applied here at the
house to be admitted, as not regularly belonging to our town,
and—yes, you are right, Bounderby, you are
right.’

‘Now, stop a bit!’ cried Bounderby, once
more.  ‘Louisa saw her when she came?’

‘Louisa certainly did see her, for she mentioned the
application to me.  But Louisa saw her, I have no doubt, in
Mrs. Gradgrind’s presence.’

‘Pray, Mrs. Gradgrind,’ said Bounderby,
‘what passed?’

‘Oh, my poor health!’ returned Mrs.
Gradgrind.  ‘The girl wanted to come to the school,
and Mr. Gradgrind wanted girls to come to the school, and Louisa
and Thomas both said that the girl wanted to come, and that Mr.
Gradgrind wanted girls to come, and how was it possible to
contradict them when such was the fact!’

‘Now I tell you what, Gradgrind!’ said Mr.
Bounderby.  ‘Turn this girl to the right about, and
there’s an end of it.’

‘I am much of your opinion.’

‘Do it at once,’ said Bounderby, ‘has always
been my motto from a child.  When I thought I would run away
from my egg-box and my grandmother, I did it at once.  Do
you the same.  Do this at once!’

‘Are you walking?’ asked his friend. 
‘I have the father’s address.  Perhaps you would
not mind walking to town with me?’

‘Not the least in the world,’ said Mr. Bounderby,
‘as long as you do it at once!’

So, Mr. Bounderby threw on his hat—he always threw it
on, as expressing a man who had been far too busily employed in
making himself, to acquire any fashion of wearing his
hat—and with his hands in his pockets, sauntered out into
the hall.  ‘I never wear gloves,’ it was his
custom to say.  ‘I didn’t climb up the ladder in
them.—Shouldn’t be so high up, if I
had.’

them

Being left to saunter in the hall a minute or two while Mr.
Gradgrind went up-stairs for the address, he opened the door of
the children’s study and looked into that serene
floor-clothed apartment, which, notwithstanding its book-cases
and its cabinets and its variety of learned and philosophical
appliances, had much of the genial aspect of a room devoted to
hair-cutting.  Louisa languidly leaned upon the window
looking out, without looking at anything, while young Thomas
stood sniffing revengefully at the fire.  Adam Smith and
Malthus, two younger Gradgrinds, were out at lecture in custody;
and little Jane, after manufacturing a good deal of moist
pipe-clay on her face with slate-pencil and tears, had fallen
asleep over vulgar fractions.

‘It’s all right now, Louisa: it’s all right,
young Thomas,’ said Mr. Bounderby; ‘you won’t
do so any more.  I’ll answer for it’s being all
over with father.  Well, Louisa, that’s worth a kiss,
isn’t it?’

‘You can take one, Mr. Bounderby,’ returned
Louisa, when she had coldly paused, and slowly walked across the
room, and ungraciously raised her cheek towards him, with her face
turned away.

‘Always my pet; ain’t you, Louisa?’ said Mr.
Bounderby.  ‘Good-bye, Louisa!’

He went his way, but she stood on the same spot, rubbing the
cheek he had kissed, with her handkerchief, until it was burning
red.  She was still doing this, five minutes afterwards.

‘What are you about, Loo?’ her brother sulkily
remonstrated.  ‘You’ll rub a hole in your
face.’

‘You may cut the piece out with your penknife if you
like, Tom.  I wouldn’t cry!’

Coketown, to which Messrs.
Bounderby and Gradgrind now walked, was a triumph of fact; it had
no greater taint of fancy in it than Mrs. Gradgrind
herself.  Let us strike the key-note, Coketown, before
pursuing our tune.

It was a town of red brick, or of brick that would have been
red if the smoke and ashes had allowed it; but as matters stood,
it was a town of unnatural red and black like the painted face of
a savage.  It was a town of machinery and tall chimneys, out
of which interminable serpents of smoke trailed themselves for
ever and ever, and never got uncoiled.  It had a black canal
in it, and a river that ran purple with ill-smelling dye, and
vast piles of building full of windows where there was a rattling
and a trembling all day long, and where the piston of the
steam-engine worked monotonously up and down, like the head of an
elephant in a state of melancholy madness.  It contained
several large streets all very like one another, and many small
streets still more like one another, inhabited by people equally
like one another, who all went in and out at the same hours, with
the same sound upon the same pavements, to do the same work, and
to whom every day was the same as yesterday and to-morrow, and
every year the counterpart of the last and the next.

These attributes of Coketown were in the main inseparable from
the work by which it was sustained; against them were to be set
off, comforts of life which found their way all over the world,
and elegancies of life which made, we will not ask how much of
the fine lady, who could scarcely bear to hear the place
mentioned.  The rest of its features were voluntary, and
they were these.

You saw nothing in Coketown but what was severely
workful.  If the members of a religious persuasion built a
chapel there—as the members of eighteen religious
persuasions had done—they made it a pious warehouse of red
brick, with sometimes (but this is only in highly ornamental
examples) a bell in a birdcage on the top of it.  The
solitary exception was the New Church; a stuccoed edifice with a
square steeple over the door, terminating in four short pinnacles
like florid wooden legs.  All the public inscriptions in the
town were painted alike, in severe characters of black and
white.  The jail might have been the infirmary, the
infirmary might have been the jail, the town-hall might have been
either, or both, or anything else, for anything that appeared to
the contrary in the graces of their construction.  Fact,
fact, fact, everywhere in the material aspect of the town; fact,
fact, fact, everywhere in the immaterial.  The
M’Choakumchild school was all fact, and the school of
design was all fact, and the relations between master and man
were all fact, and everything was fact between the lying-in
hospital and the cemetery, and what you couldn’t state in
figures, or show to be purchaseable in the cheapest market and
saleable in the dearest, was not, and never should be, world
without end, Amen.

A town so sacred to fact, and so triumphant in its assertion,
of course got on well?  Why no, not quite well. 
No?  Dear me!

No.  Coketown did not come out of its own furnaces, in
all respects like gold that had stood the fire.  First, the
perplexing mystery of the place was, Who belonged to the eighteen
denominations?  Because, whoever did, the labouring people
did not.  It was very strange to walk through the streets on
a Sunday morning, and note how few of them the barbarous
jangling of bells that was driving the sick and nervous mad,
called away from their own quarter, from their own close rooms,
from the corners of their own streets, where they lounged
listlessly, gazing at all the church and chapel going, as at a
thing with which they had no manner of concern.  Nor was it
merely the stranger who noticed this, because there was a native
organization in Coketown itself, whose members were to be heard
of in the House of Commons every session, indignantly petitioning
for acts of parliament that should make these people religious by
main force.  Then came the Teetotal Society, who complained
that these same people would get drunk, and showed in
tabular statements that they did get drunk, and proved at tea
parties that no inducement, human or Divine (except a medal),
would induce them to forego their custom of getting drunk. 
Then came the chemist and druggist, with other tabular
statements, showing that when they didn’t get drunk, they
took opium.  Then came the experienced chaplain of the jail,
with more tabular statements, outdoing all the previous tabular
statements, and showing that the same people would resort
to low haunts, hidden from the public eye, where they heard low
singing and saw low dancing, and mayhap joined in it; and where
A. B., aged twenty-four next birthday, and committed for eighteen
months’ solitary, had himself said (not that he had ever
shown himself particularly worthy of belief) his ruin began, as
he was perfectly sure and confident that otherwise he would have
been a tip-top moral specimen.  Then came Mr. Gradgrind and
Mr. Bounderby, the two gentlemen at this present moment walking
through Coketown, and both eminently practical, who could, on
occasion, furnish more tabular statements derived from their own
personal experience, and illustrated by cases they had known and
seen, from which it clearly appeared—in short, it was the
only clear thing in the case—that these same people were a
bad lot altogether, gentlemen; that do what you would for them
they were never thankful for it, gentlemen; that they were
restless, gentlemen; that they never knew what they wanted; that
they lived upon the best, and bought fresh butter; and insisted
on Mocha coffee, and rejected all but prime parts of meat, and
yet were eternally dissatisfied and unmanageable.  In short,
it was the moral of the old nursery fable:

them

would

would

There was an old woman, and what do you think?
She lived upon nothing but victuals and drink;
Victuals and drink were the whole of her diet,
And yet this old woman would NEVER
be quiet.

Is it possible, I wonder, that there was any analogy between
the case of the Coketown population and the case of the little
Gradgrinds?  Surely, none of us in our sober senses and
acquainted with figures, are to be told at this time of day, that
one of the foremost elements in the existence of the Coketown
working-people had been for scores of years, deliberately set at
nought?  That there was any Fancy in them demanding to be
brought into healthy existence instead of struggling on in
convulsions?  That exactly in the ratio as they worked long
and monotonously, the craving grew within them for some physical
relief—some relaxation, encouraging good humour and good
spirits, and giving them a vent—some recognized holiday,
though it were but for an honest dance to a stirring band of
music—some occasional light pie in which even
M’Choakumchild had no finger—which craving must and
would be satisfied aright, or must and would inevitably go wrong,
until the laws of the Creation were repealed?

‘This man lives at Pod’s End, and I don’t
quite know Pod’s End,’ said Mr. Gradgrind. 
‘Which is it, Bounderby?’

Mr. Bounderby knew it was somewhere down town, but knew no
more respecting it.  So they stopped for a moment, looking
about.

Almost as they did so, there came running round the corner of
the street at a quick pace and with a frightened look, a girl
whom Mr. Gradgrind recognized.  ‘Halloa!’ said
he.  ‘Stop!  Where are you going!
Stop!’  Girl number twenty stopped then, palpitating,
and made him a curtsey.

‘Why are you tearing about the streets,’ said Mr.
Gradgrind, ‘in this improper manner?’

‘I was—I was run after, sir,’ the girl
panted, ‘and I wanted to get away.’

‘Run after?’ repeated Mr. Gradgrind. 
‘Who would run after you?’

you

The question was unexpectedly and suddenly answered for her,
by the colourless boy, Bitzer, who came round the corner with
such blind speed and so little anticipating a stoppage on the
pavement, that he brought himself up against Mr.
Gradgrind’s waistcoat and rebounded into the road.

‘What do you mean, boy?’ said Mr. Gradgrind. 
‘What are you doing?  How dare you dash
against—everybody—in this manner?’  Bitzer
picked up his cap, which the concussion had knocked off; and
backing, and knuckling his forehead, pleaded that it was an
accident.

‘Was this boy running after you, Jupe?’ asked Mr.
Gradgrind.

‘Yes, sir,’ said the girl reluctantly.

‘No, I wasn’t, sir!’ cried Bitzer. 
‘Not till she run away from me.  But the horse-riders
never mind what they say, sir; they’re famous for it. 
You know the horse-riders are famous for never minding what they
say,’ addressing Sissy.  ‘It’s as well
known in the town as—please, sir, as the multiplication
table isn’t known to the horse-riders.’  Bitzer
tried Mr. Bounderby with this.

‘He frightened me so,’ said the girl, ‘with
his cruel faces!’

‘Oh!’ cried Bitzer.  ‘Oh! 
An’t you one of the rest!  An’t you a
horse-rider!  I never looked at her, sir.  I asked her
if she would know how to define a horse to-morrow, and offered to
tell her again, and she ran away, and I ran after her, sir, that
she might know how to answer when she was asked.  You
wouldn’t have thought of saying such mischief if you
hadn’t been a horse-rider?’

‘Her calling seems to be pretty well known among
’em,’ observed Mr. Bounderby. 
‘You’d have had the whole school peeping in a row, in
a week.’

‘Truly, I think so,’ returned his friend. 
‘Bitzer, turn you about and take yourself home. Jupe, stay
here a moment.  Let me hear of your running in this manner
any more, boy, and you will hear of me through the master of the
school.  You understand what I mean.  Go
along.’

The boy stopped in his rapid blinking, knuckled his forehead
again, glanced at Sissy, turned about, and retreated.

‘Now, girl,’ said Mr. Gradgrind, ‘take this
gentleman and me to your father’s; we are going
there.  What have you got in that bottle you are
carrying?’

‘Gin,’ said Mr. Bounderby.

‘Dear, no, sir!  It’s the nine
oils.’

‘The what?’ cried Mr. Bounderby.

‘The nine oils, sir, to rub father with.’

‘Then,’ said Mr. Bounderby, with a loud short
laugh, ‘what the devil do you rub your father with nine
oils for?’

‘It’s what our people aways use, sir, when they
get any hurts in the ring,’ replied the girl, looking over
her shoulder, to assure herself that her pursuer was gone. 
‘They bruise themselves very bad sometimes.’

‘Serve ’em right,’ said Mr. Bounderby,
‘for being idle.’  She glanced up at his face,
with mingled astonishment and dread.

‘By George!’ said Mr. Bounderby, ‘when I was
four or five years younger than you, I had worse bruises upon me
than ten oils, twenty oils, forty oils, would have rubbed
off.  I didn’t get ’em by posture-making, but by
being banged about.  There was no rope-dancing for me; I
danced on the bare ground and was larruped with the
rope.’

Mr. Gradgrind, though hard enough, was by no means so rough a
man as Mr. Bounderby.  His character was not unkind, all
things considered; it might have been a very kind one indeed, if
he had only made some round mistake in the arithmetic that
balanced it, years ago.  He said, in what he meant for a
reassuring tone, as they turned down a narrow road, ‘And
this is Pod’s End; is it, Jupe?’

‘This is it, sir, and—if you wouldn’t mind,
sir—this is the house.’

She stopped, at twilight, at the door of a mean little
public-house, with dim red lights in it.  As haggard and as
shabby, as if, for want of custom, it had itself taken to
drinking, and had gone the way all drunkards go, and was very
near the end of it.

‘It’s only crossing the bar, sir, and up the
stairs, if you wouldn’t mind, and waiting there for a
moment till I get a candle.  If you should hear a dog, sir,
it’s only Merrylegs, and he only barks.’

‘Merrylegs and nine oils, eh!’ said Mr. Bounderby,
entering last with his metallic laugh.  ‘Pretty well
this, for a self-made man!’

The name of the public-house was
the Pegasus’s Arms.  The Pegasus’s legs might
have been more to the purpose; but, underneath the winged horse
upon the sign-board, the Pegasus’s Arms was inscribed in
Roman letters.  Beneath that inscription again, in a flowing
scroll, the painter had touched off the lines:

Good malt makes good beer,
Walk in, and they’ll draw it here;
Good wine makes good brandy,
Give us a call, and you’ll find it handy.

Framed and glazed upon the wall behind the dingy little bar,
was another Pegasus—a theatrical one—with real gauze
let in for his wings, golden stars stuck on all over him, and his
ethereal harness made of red silk.

As it had grown too dusky without, to see the sign, and as it
had not grown light enough within to see the picture, Mr.
Gradgrind and Mr. Bounderby received no offence from these
idealities.  They followed the girl up some steep
corner-stairs without meeting any one, and stopped in the dark
while she went on for a candle.  They expected every moment
to hear Merrylegs give tongue, but the highly trained performing
dog had not barked when the girl and the candle appeared
together.

‘Father is not in our room, sir,’ she said, with a
face of great surprise.  ‘If you wouldn’t mind
walking in, I’ll find him directly.’  They
walked in; and Sissy, having set two chairs for them, sped away
with a quick light step.  It was a mean, shabbily furnished
room, with a bed in it.  The white night-cap, embellished
with two peacock’s feathers and a pigtail bolt upright, in
which Signor Jupe had that very afternoon enlivened the varied
performances with his chaste Shaksperean quips and retorts, hung
upon a nail; but no other portion of his wardrobe, or other token
of himself or his pursuits, was to be seen anywhere.  As to
Merrylegs, that respectable ancestor of the highly trained animal
who went aboard the ark, might have been accidentally shut out of
it, for any sign of a dog that was manifest to eye or ear in the
Pegasus’s Arms.

They heard the doors of rooms above, opening and shutting as
Sissy went from one to another in quest of her father; and
presently they heard voices expressing surprise.  She came
bounding down again in a great hurry, opened a battered and mangy
old hair trunk, found it empty, and looked round with her hands
clasped and her face full of terror.

‘Father must have gone down to the Booth, sir.  I
don’t know why he should go there, but he must be there;
I’ll bring him in a minute!’  She was gone
directly, without her bonnet; with her long, dark, childish hair
streaming behind her.

‘What does she mean!’ said Mr. Gradgrind. 
‘Back in a minute?  It’s more than a mile
off.’

Before Mr. Bounderby could reply, a young man appeared at the
door, and introducing himself with the words, ‘By your
leaves, gentlemen!’ walked in with his hands in his
pockets.  His face, close-shaven, thin, and sallow, was
shaded by a great quantity of dark hair, brushed into a roll all
round his head, and parted up the centre.  His legs were
very robust, but shorter than legs of good proportions should
have been.  His chest and back were as much too broad, as
his legs were too short.  He was dressed in a Newmarket coat
and tight-fitting trousers; wore a shawl round his neck; smelt of
lamp-oil, straw, orange-peel, horses’ provender, and
sawdust; and looked a most remarkable sort of Centaur, compounded
of the stable and the play-house.  Where the one began, and
the other ended, nobody could have told with any precision. 
This gentleman was mentioned in the bills of the day as Mr. E. W.
B. Childers, so justly celebrated for his daring vaulting act as
the Wild Huntsman of the North American Prairies; in which
popular performance, a diminutive boy with an old face, who now
accompanied him, assisted as his infant son: being carried upside
down over his father’s shoulder, by one foot, and held by
the crown of his head, heels upwards, in the palm of his
father’s hand, according to the violent paternal manner in
which wild huntsmen may be observed to fondle their
offspring.  Made up with curls, wreaths, wings, white
bismuth, and carmine, this hopeful young person soared into so
pleasing a Cupid as to constitute the chief delight of the
maternal part of the spectators; but in private, where his
characteristics were a precocious cutaway coat and an extremely
gruff voice, he became of the Turf, turfy.

‘By your leaves, gentlemen,’ said Mr. E. W. B.
Childers, glancing round the room.  ‘It was you, I
believe, that were wishing to see Jupe!’

‘It was,’ said Mr. Gradgrind.  ‘His
daughter has gone to fetch him, but I can’t wait;
therefore, if you please, I will leave a message for him with
you.’

‘You see, my friend,’ Mr. Bounderby put in,
‘we are the kind of people who know the value of time, and
you are the kind of people who don’t know the value of
time.’

‘I have not,’ retorted Mr. Childers, after
surveying him from head to foot, ‘the honour of knowing
you,—but if you mean that you can make more money of
your time than I can of mine, I should judge from your
appearance, that you are about right.’

you

‘And when you have made it, you can keep it too, I
should think,’ said Cupid.

‘Kidderminster, stow that!’ said Mr.
Childers.  (Master Kidderminster was Cupid’s mortal
name.)

‘What does he come here cheeking us for, then?’
cried Master Kidderminster, showing a very irascible
temperament.  ‘If you want to cheek us, pay your ochre
at the doors and take it out.’

‘Kidderminster,’ said Mr. Childers, raising his
voice, ‘stow that!—Sir,’ to Mr. Gradgrind,
‘I was addressing myself to you.  You may or you may
not be aware (for perhaps you have not been much in the
audience), that Jupe has missed his tip very often,
lately.’

‘Has—what has he missed?’ asked Mr.
Gradgrind, glancing at the potent Bounderby for assistance.

‘Missed his tip.’

‘Offered at the Garters four times last night, and never
done ’em once,’ said Master Kidderminster. 
‘Missed his tip at the banners, too, and was loose in his
ponging.’

‘Didn’t do what he ought to do.  Was short in
his leaps and bad in his tumbling,’ Mr. Childers
interpreted.

‘Oh!’ said Mr. Gradgrind, ‘that is tip, is
it?’

‘In a general way that’s missing his tip,’
Mr. E. W. B. Childers answered.

‘Nine oils, Merrylegs, missing tips, garters, banners,
and Ponging, eh!’ ejaculated Bounderby, with his laugh of
laughs.  ‘Queer sort of company, too, for a man who
has raised himself!’

‘Lower yourself, then,’ retorted Cupid. 
‘Oh Lord! if you’ve raised yourself so high as all
that comes to, let yourself down a bit.’

‘This is a very obtrusive lad!’ said Mr.
Gradgrind, turning, and knitting his brows on him.

‘We’d have had a young gentleman to meet you, if
we had known you were coming,’ retorted Master
Kidderminster, nothing abashed.  ‘It’s a pity
you don’t have a bespeak, being so particular. 
You’re on the Tight-Jeff, ain’t you?’

‘What does this unmannerly boy mean,’ asked Mr.
Gradgrind, eyeing him in a sort of desperation, ‘by
Tight-Jeff?’

‘There!  Get out, get out!’ said Mr.
Childers, thrusting his young friend from the room, rather in the
prairie manner.  ‘Tight-Jeff or Slack-Jeff, it
don’t much signify: it’s only tight-rope and
slack-rope.  You were going to give me a message for
Jupe?’

‘Yes, I was.’

‘Then,’ continued Mr. Childers, quickly, ‘my
opinion is, he will never receive it.  Do you know much of
him?’

‘I never saw the man in my life.’

‘I doubt if you ever will see him now. 
It’s pretty plain to me, he’s off.’

will

‘Do you mean that he has deserted his
daughter?’

‘Ay!  I mean,’ said Mr. Childers, with a nod,
‘that he has cut.  He was goosed last night, he was
goosed the night before last, he was goosed to-day.  He has
lately got in the way of being always goosed, and he can’t
stand it.’

‘Why has he been—so very much—Goosed?’
asked Mr. Gradgrind, forcing the word out of himself, with great
solemnity and reluctance.

‘His joints are turning stiff, and he is getting used
up,’ said Childers.  ‘He has his points as a
Cackler still, but he can’t get a living out of
them.’

them

‘A Cackler!’ Bounderby repeated.  ‘Here
we go again!’

‘A speaker, if the gentleman likes it better,’
said Mr. E. W. B. Childers, superciliously throwing the
interpretation over his shoulder, and accompanying it with a
shake of his long hair—which all shook at once. 
‘Now, it’s a remarkable fact, sir, that it cut that
man deeper, to know that his daughter knew of his being goosed,
than to go through with it.’

‘Good!’ interrupted Mr. Bounderby. 
‘This is good, Gradgrind!  A man so fond of his
daughter, that he runs away from her!  This is devilish
good!  Ha! ha!  Now, I’ll tell you what, young
man.  I haven’t always occupied my present station of
life.  I know what these things are.  You may be
astonished to hear it, but my mother—ran away from
me.’

me

E. W. B. Childers replied pointedly, that he was not at all
astonished to hear it.

‘Very well,’ said Bounderby.  ‘I was
born in a ditch, and my mother ran away from me.  Do I
excuse her for it?  No.  Have I ever excused her for
it?  Not I.  What do I call her for it?  I call
her probably the very worst woman that ever lived in the world,
except my drunken grandmother.  There’s no family
pride about me, there’s no imaginative sentimental humbug
about me.  I call a spade a spade; and I call the mother of
Josiah Bounderby of Coketown, without any fear or any favour,
what I should call her if she had been the mother of Dick Jones
of Wapping.  So, with this man.  He is a runaway rogue
and a vagabond, that’s what he is, in English.’

‘It’s all the same to me what he is or what he is
not, whether in English or whether in French,’ retorted Mr.
E. W. B. Childers, facing about.  ‘I am telling your
friend what’s the fact; if you don’t like to hear it,
you can avail yourself of the open air.  You give it mouth
enough, you do; but give it mouth in your own building at
least,’ remonstrated E. W. B. with stern irony. 
‘Don’t give it mouth in this building, till
you’re called upon.  You have got some building of
your own I dare say, now?’

‘Perhaps so,’ replied Mr. Bounderby, rattling his
money and laughing.

‘Then give it mouth in your own building, will you, if
you please?’ said Childers.  ‘Because this
isn’t a strong building, and too much of you might bring it
down!’