Page:Life of William Blake 2, Gilchrist.djvu/464

possible to separate the story of the child's life and development from some hasty delineation of that father's character. James, born in 1783, was the posthumous son of a farmer at Larbert near Falkirk. By nature studious, his active inquiring mind proved fertile soil to those seeds of knowledge which are scattered with a somewhat more liberal hand in the village schools of Scotland than of England. Larbert also supplied the boy with friends it would not have been easy to better in a city. There was Willie the Norelin (quaintly shrewd), a journeyman carpenter who had served his apprenticeship in Peterhead, and worked in all the principal towns in Scotland for the sake of insight, as he called it. He was given to the study of Physics, lent the boy philosophical books and, by his serious, earnest, upright character, exercised on him an influence for good that proved lasting. There was old Sanders the weaver, 'who liked anything better than weaving,' and mounted the treadles as reluctantly as if he were going to the scaffold; but could wrench out a tooth, broach a vein, splice a bone, define the qualities of herbs, make shuttles, fiddles, cuckoo-clocks, prune trees, shave; above all, on Saturday night, when his tongue went faster than his razor; could tell marvellous tales from old books of travel (Shaw, Bruce, Lithgow), from memoirs, histories; was great in legendary lore—the deeds of William Wallace, the Graeme, Robert Bruce; the wonders of the vanished city of Camelon, with gates of brass, which had stood on that very spot in the days of the Romans. Yet with a curious admixture of shrewdness and scepticism would old Sanders, in his private talk, slyly hint suspicion of his own wonders, that plunged his young listener from sunny dreams into a chill, comfortless, wintry atmosphere; not without wholesome results either, to one who grew up an ardent truth-seeker. There was, besides, a day-labourer who had never been to school, and owned no books, yet had an acuteness of observation, an insatiable thirst for knowledge, that triumphed over all obstacles. He