saw nothing of it) as if fantastic hope could
take as strong a hold as Fact.

This observation must be limited exclusively
to his daughter. As to Tom, he was becoming
that not unprecedented triumph of calculation
which is usually at work on number one.
As to Mrs. Gradgrind, if she said anything
on the subject, she would come a little way
out of her wrappers, like a feminine dormouse,
and say:

"Good gracious bless me how my poor
head is vexed and worried by that girl Jupe's
so perseveringly asking, over and over again,
about her tiresome letters! Upon my word
and honour I seem to be fated, and destined,
and ordained, to live in the midst of things
that I am never to hear the last of. It really
is a most extraordinary circumstance that it
appears as if I never was to hear the last
of anything!"

At about this point, Mr. Gradgrind's eye
would fall upon her; and under the influence
of that wintry piece of fact, she would become
torpid again.

CHAPTER X.

I ENTERTAIN a weak idea that the English
people are as hard-worked as any people upon
whom the sun shines. I acknowledge to this
ridiculous idiosyncrasy, as a reason why I
would give them a little more play.

In the hardest working part of Coketown; in
the innermost fortifications of that ugly citadel,
where Nature was as strongly bricked out as
killing airs and gases were bricked in; at
the heart of the labyrinth of narrow courts
upon courts, and close streets upon streets,
which had come into existence piecemeal,
every piece in a violent hurry for some one
man's purpose, and the whole an unnatural
family, shouldering, and trampling, and
pressing one another to death; in the last
close nook of this great exhausted receiver,
where the chimneys, for want of air to make a
draught, were built in an immense variety of
stunted and crooked shapes, as though every
house put out a sign of the kind of people
who might be expected to be born in it;
among the multitude of Coketown, generically
called " the Hands,"—a race who would
have found more favour with some people, if
Providence had seen fit to make them only
hands, or, like the lower creatures of the
seashore, only hands and stomachs—lived a
certain Stephen Blackpool, forty years of age.

Stephen looked older, but he had had a hard
life. It is said that every life has its roses and
thorns; there seemed, however, to have been
a misadventure or mistake in Stephen's
case, whereby somebody else had become
possessed of his roses, and he had become
possessed of the same somebody else's thorns
in addition to his own. He had known, to use
his words, a peck of trouble. He was usually
called Old Stephen, in a kind of rough homage
to the fact.

A rather stooping man, with a knitted
brow, a pondering expression of face, and a
hard-looking head sufficiently capacious, on
which his iron-grey hair lay long and thin,
Old Stephen might have passed for a particularly
intelligent man in his condition. Yet
he was not. He took no place among those
remarkable " Hands," who, piecing together
their broken intervals of leisure through
many years, had mastered difficult sciences,
and acquired a knowledge of most unlikely
things. He held no station among the Hands
who could make speeches and carry on
debates. Thousands of his compeers could
talk much better than he, at any time.
He was a good power-loom weaver, and a
man of perfect integrity. What more he was,
or what else he had in him, if anything, let
him show for himself.

The lights in the great factories, which
looked, when they were illuminated, like
Fairy palaces—or the travellers by
express-train said so—were all extinguished;
and the bells had rung for knocking off for
the night, and had ceased again; and the
Hands, men and women, boy and girl, were
clattering home. Old Stephen was standing
in the street, with the odd sensation upon him
which the stoppage of the machinery always
produced—the sensation of its having worked
and stopped in his own head.

"Yet I don't see Rachael, still!" said he.

It was a wet night, and many groups of
young women passed him, with their shawls
drawn over their bare heads and held close
under their chins to keep the rain out. He
knew Rachael well, for a glance at any one of
these groups was sufficient to show him that
she was not there. At last, there were no
more to come; and then he turned away,
saying in a tone of disappointment, " Why,
then, I ha' missed her!"

But, he had not gone the length of three
streets, when he saw another of the shawled
figures in advance of him, at which he looked
so keenly that perhaps its mere shadow
indistinctly reflected on the wet pavement—if
he could have seen it without the figure
itself moving along from lamp to lamp,
brightening and fading as it went—would have
been enough to tell him who was there.
Making his pace at once much quicker and
much softer, he darted on until he was very
near this figure, then fell into his former walk,
and called " Rachael!"

She turned, being then in the brightness of
a lamp; and raising her hood a little, showed
a quiet oval face, dark and rather delicate,
irradiated by a pair of very gentle eyes, and
further set off by the perfect order of her
shining black hair. It was not a face in its
first bloom; she was a woman five and thirty
years of age.

"Ah, lad! 'Tis thou? " when she had
said this, with a smile which would have been
quite expressed, though nothing of her had
been seen but her pleasant eyes, she replaced
her hood again, and they went on together.