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Updated: June 12, 2025
For it was the big ones who rode the little ones, with neatly-cut ash-sticks and clumsy spurs. I can see them now, with the thin legs of the small boys tottering under them, like a young donkey overridden by a coal-heaver. It was the shambling, ill-proportioned lads who suffered most. The biggest boy in school rode me, as a rule, but he was not at all a bad bully, so I was lucky.
It is true, he asked every one near him to eat of every thing he could himself reach, and that he used his knife as a coal-heaver uses a shovel; but the company he was in, though fastidious in its own deportment, was altogether above the silver-forkisms, and this portion of his demeanour, if it did not escape undetected, passed away unnoticed.
He talked of turning coal-heaver, Methodist preacher, anything that came to hand, provided that he could but keep independence and a clear conscience. And all the while the man seemed to be struggling with some great purpose, to feel that he had a work to do, though what it was, and how it was to be done, he did not see.
"It is my child!" she cried despairingly; "my poor reckless darling! Come down, Edward; for your poor mother's sake, come down." "Dear heart," said a woman, "it is the lady's son. Poor thing!" "Stand on my knee, ma'am," said a coal-heaver. "Oh no, sir, no. I could not look at him for the world. I can only pray for him. Good people, pray for us!"
Assured that there was no one near, he communicated his thoughts as follows: "The same idee has been at work here," he said, tapping his forehead with a fore-finger, "and good may come of it This Mr. Sennit is a cunning chap, and will want good looking after, but his mate drinks like a coal-heaver; I can see that in his whole face; a top-lantern is not lighter. He must be handled by brandy.
She had seen many dirty, poverty-stricken mavericks of humanity, but never a more battered specimen than this gaunt, hollow-eyed tramp, black as a coal-heaver, whose flesh showed grimy with livid wounds through the shreds of his clothing. But beneath his steady look the derision died. Tattered his coat and trousers might be. At least he was a prince in adversity.
The coal-heaver, hailing from some distant province, seemed to have set himself the grim task of provoking the infuriated populace to some terrible deed of revenge against Deroulede and Juliette. The darkness of the street, the fast-falling mist which obscured the light from the meagre oil lamps, seemed to add a certain weirdness to this moving, seething multitude. No one could see his neighbour.
The patriarchal family was a source of strength in primitive society; today it would be a needless tyranny. Life in a tropical isle frees man from the necessity of many virtues which a more rigorous climate entails. The poet needs to live in a different way from the coal-heaver. This is no condemnation of eudsemonistic morality.
In England, in his magnificent Suffolk home, he was a confirmed sybarite, in whose service every description of comfort and luxury had to be enrolled. Here tonight in the rough and tattered clothes of a coal-heaver, drenched to the skin, and crouching under the body of a cart that hardly sheltered him from the rain, he was as happy as a schoolboy out for a holiday. Happy, but vaguely anxious.
He now inserted a finger at the wrist of the left-hand glove, ripped it off, and flung it with its fellow under the grate. Thereafter he gathered some ashes and soot from the fireplace, with which he put his hands on a footing with those of a coal-heaver. "Will you take me now, captain?" he said, returning to the hammock, and spreading out his hands.
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