He was not an average man. Yet such men as he are reared
here and there in every generation of our peasant artisans--with an
inheritance of affections nurtured by a simple family life of common
need and common industry, and an inheritance of faculties trained
in skilful courageous labour: they make their way upwards, rarely as
geniuses, most commonly as painstaking honest men, with the skill and
conscience to do well the tasks that lie before them. Their lives have
no discernible echo beyond the neighbourhood where they dwelt, but you
are almost sure to find there some good piece of road, some building,
some application of mineral produce, some improvement in farming
practice, some reform of parish abuses, with which their names are
associated by one or two generations after them. Their employers were
the richer for them, the work of their hands has worn well, and the work
of their brains has guided well the hands of other men. They went about
in their youth in flannel or paper caps, in coats black with coal-dust
or streaked with lime and red paint; in old age their white hairs are
seen in a place of honour at church and at market, and they tell their
well-dressed sons and daughters, seated round the bright hearth on
winter evenings, how pleased they were when they first earned their
twopence a-day.
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