sweetness he would have them read aloud to him, and used to box his
apprentice's ears if he skipped a line. As a consequence he was not
always very punctual in the delivery of his work when he had promised
it: on the other hand, his work was always sound: it might wear out the
user's feet, but there was no wearing out his leather....

The old fellow had in his shop a grandson of thirteen, a hunchback, a
sickly, rickety boy, who used to run his errands, and was a sort of
apprentice. The boy's mother had left her family when she was seventeen
to elope with a worthless fellow who had sunk into hooliganism, and
before very long had been caught, sentenced, and so disappeared from the
scene. She was left alone with the child, deserted by her family, and
devoted herself to the upbringing of the boy Emmanuel. She had
transferred to him all the love and hatred she had had for her lover.
She was a woman of a violent and jealous character, morbid to a degree.
She loved her child to distraction, brutally ill-treated him, and, when
he was ill, was crazed with despair. When she was in a bad temper she
would send him to bed without any dinner, without so much as a piece of
bread. When she was dragging him along through the streets, if he grew
tired and would not go on and slipped down to the ground, she would kick
him on to his feet again. She was amazingly incoherent in her use of
words, and she used to pass swiftly from tears to a hysterical mood of
gaiety. She died. The cobbler took the boy, who was then six years old.
He loved him dearly: but he had his own way of showing it, which
consisted in bullying the boy, battering him with a large assortment of
insulting names, pulling his ears, and clouting him over the head
from morning to night by way of teaching him his job: and at the same time
he grounded him thoroughly in his own social and anti-clerical catechism.

Emmanuel knew that his grandfather was not a bad man: but he was always