Page 40 - An Australian Lassie

CHAPTER X

RTCHES OR RAGS

Captain Carew and John Brown--big John Brown in Betty's parlance--sat at dinner together.

Although not an elegant dinner table it was very far removed from being a poor one. The linen, silver and
glass were all of the best, the very best; the man-servant was decorous and swift of eye, foot and hand, and the
menu was beyond any that had entered into John Brown's knowledge, before he came to Dene Hall. Yet he
was out of love with it all.

Captain Carew had his glass of clear saffron-coloured wine at his right hand. His silver fork was making easy
journeyings from a slice of cold turkey on his plate, to his mouth, and his eyes were now and again running
over a long type-written letter that lay before him.

He was well pleased, well fed, and interested, and he had no reason to suppose John Brown was in any other
humour than himself.

He had heard that the thoughts of youth were of vast length, and perhaps he believed it. But he did not think
John's had reached quite as far as wishing to be a cobbler in a country village.

And it must be confessed that few, seeing the appetite the boy brought to his plate of cold turkey and
"snowed" potato, would have suspected him of longing for a "crust of bread and a drink of cold water."

The truth was, he had been of late ransacking his grandfather's library and had found besides sea-stories and
stories of wrecks, and foreign lands and pirates and deep sea treasure--what interested him more than all, a
volume of biographies of self-made men.

He had lingered longingly over their boyhoods; their brief school times (when such times were lacking
altogether he liked both man and story better); their privations, struggles, self-reliance and success. The
success interested him the least. That came, of course, he decided, to all who tried hard enough. But the
privations! The struggle! The self-reliance! How his eyes shone and his heart beat at it!

There was the story of Richard Arkwright, the great mechanician. He was never at school in his life--never
forced to do ridiculous sums, to spell correctly, to parse, to drill, to sing! His biographer said that the only
education he ever received he gave himself--that he was fifty years of age when he set to work to learn
grammar and to improve his hand-writing. He did not waste the precious hours of his youth over such things.
When he was a boy he was apprenticed to a barber, and when he set up in business for himself he occupied an
underground cellar and put up his sign--"Come to the subterraneous barber; he shaves for a penny." This
caused brisk competition, and a general reduction in barber's prices. Yet not to be beaten, Arkwright altered
his sign to "A clean shave for a halfpenny." Then he turned his attention to wig-making, and from that to
machine-making. And years and years passed. Years filled with patient labour, privations, obstacles, and at
last Success! "Eighteen years after he had constructed his first machine he rose to such estimation in
Derbyshire that he was appointed High Sheriff of the county, and shortly afterwards George TTT conferred
upon him the honour of knighthood." So said the book.

Shakespeare, he read, was the son of a butcher and grazier; Sir Cloudesley Shovel, the great admiral, a
cobbler's son; Stephenson was an engine-fireman; Turner, the great painter, came from a barber's shop.

Life after life he had turned over of men who had risen from the ranks and gotten for themselves fame and
riches. So that at last he came to regard humble birth and poverty as the necessary foundations of ultimate
success. He noticed that his heroes all worked hard and patiently; were all brave and sternly self-disciplined,