boy.
"Here he is!" said Mr. Winterbottom.
Paul went to the counter.
"Seventeen pounds eleven and fivepence. Why don't you shout up when
you're called?" said Mr. Braithwaite. He banged on to the invoice a
five-pound bag of silver, then in a delicate and pretty movement, picked
up a little ten-pound column of gold, and plumped it beside the silver.
The gold slid in a bright stream over the paper. The cashier finished
counting off the money; the boy dragged the whole down the counter to
Mr. Winterbottom, to whom the stoppages for rent and tools must be paid.
Here he suffered again.
"Sixteen an' six," said Mr. Winterbottom.
The lad was too much upset to count. He pushed forward some loose silver
and half a sovereign.
"How much do you think you've given me?" asked Mr. Winterbottom.
The boy looked at him, but said nothing. He had not the faintest notion.
"Haven't you got a tongue in your head?"
Paul bit his lip, and pushed forward some more silver.
"Don't they teach you to count at the Board-school?" he asked.
"Nowt but algibbra an' French," said a collier.
"An' cheek an' impidence," said another.
Paul was keeping someone waiting. With trembling fingers he got his
money into the bag and slid out. He suffered the tortures of the damned
on these occasions.
His relief, when he got outside, and was walking along the Mansfield
Road, was infinite. On the park wall the mosses were green. There were
some gold and some white fowls pecking under the apple trees of an
orchard. The colliers were walking home in a stream. The boy went near
the wall, self-consciously. He knew many of the men, but could not
recognise them in their dirt. And this was a new torture to him.
When he got down to the New Inn, at Bretty, his father was not yet come.
Mrs. Wharmby, the landlady, knew him. His grandmother, Morel's mother,
had been Mrs. Wharmby's friend.
"Your father's not come yet," said the landlady, in the peculiar
half-scornful, half-patronising voice of a woman who talks chiefly to
grown men. "Sit you down."
Paul sat down on the edge of the bench in the bar. Some colliers were
"reckoning"--sharing out their money--in a corner; others came in. They
all glanced at the boy without speaking. At last Morel came; brisk, and
with something of an air, even in his blackness.
"Hello!" he said rather tenderly to his son. "Have you bested me? Shall
you have a drink of something?"
Paul and all the children were bred up fierce anti-alcoholists, and he
would have suffered more in drinking a lemonade before all the men than
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