"Nay, Bill, nay," Bartle was saying in a kind tone, as he nodded to
Adam, "begin that again, and then perhaps, it'll come to you what d-r-y
spells. It's the same lesson you read last week, you know."
"Bill" was a sturdy fellow, aged four-and-twenty, an excellent
stone-sawyer, who could get as good wages as any man in the trade of his
years; but he found a reading lesson in words of one syllable a harder
matter to deal with than the hardest stone he had ever had to saw. The
letters, he complained, were so "uncommon alike, there was no tellin'
'em one from another," the sawyer's business not being concerned with
minute differences such as exist between a letter with its tail
turned up and a letter with its tail turned down. But Bill had a firm
determination that he would learn to read, founded chiefly on two
reasons: first, that Tom Hazelow, his cousin, could read anything "right
off," whether it was print or writing, and Tom had sent him a letter
from twenty miles off, saying how he was prospering in the world and had
got an overlooker's place; secondly, that Sam Phillips, who sawed with
him, had learned to read when he was turned twenty, and what could be
done by a little fellow like Sam Phillips, Bill considered, could
be done by himself, seeing that he could pound Sam into wet clay if
circumstances required it.
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