Download or read book MIRIAM by DANIEL FREDERICK EDWARD SYKES written by Daniel Frederick Edward Sykes and published by . This book was released on 2017-04-10 with total page 126 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: IT was the first morning of the eagerly awaited Saddleworth Wakes in the year of our Lord one thousand eight hundred and twenty-nine, a year so full of great doings in the country, and followed by a year of still greater doings, that there is little marvel that I call it easily to mind. I had been out of bed by cock-crow to steal across the bare, worm-eaten boards of the chamber floor as prattily as my six feet of height and fourteen stone of weight would permit, to peer through the long diamond-paned window of bottle-green glass up the valley towards Greenfield, the quarter whence we folk of Biggie got our weather. It was a glorious sun-rising and promised a glorious day, and so I stole back to bed in great content, glad that though it was not the Sabbath I could stretch my long limbs between the blankets-sheets were an unknown luxury for such folk as myself and fellow chamberer, Jim Haigh, sometimes called Jim o' 'Lijah's, sometimes Jim th' Tuner, but more often simply Th' Tuner.I suppose so small a bedroom rarely accommodated two men of our inches. For if I was six-feet-nothing in my stocking-feet, Jim o'ertopped me by a good four inches, and, whilst I was still, as it were, in the making, and lank and willowy, Jim, though but four years my senior, which made him four-and-twenty, was broad and deep chested, with the arms and legs of a very son of Anak. The turn-up bed,"Contrived a double debt to pay,A bed by night, a chest of drawers by day,"into which Jim insinuated himself very gingerly o' nights, creaked and groaned under his weight, and every morning he woke with cold feet, for the simple reason that they stretched a good half yard out of the bottom of the bedstead. He could not stand upright in our little chamber, and as for yawning and stretching himself, as one does in rousing from insufficient sleep, it was sheer out of the question. A giant truly was my friend Jim, but surely the gentlest and simplest of all created mortals, save when roused to wrath (and that he was not easily), and then let lesser men beware, for Jim in those rare moods knew not his own strength, and I'd as lieve have countered a sledge-hammer in punier hands as met the fall of Jim's clenched fists.Yet, curiously enough, this man of mighty girth and sinew held me in a sort of wondering reverence. For, despite my protests, Jim insisted to all and sundry of our common acquaintance that I was what he called a "powerful scholard"-I, whom my reverend father, the pastor of Pole Moor Chapel, had wept over and finally despaired of as a hopeless dunce and dullard, unfit for that ministry to which I had been destined from my cradle. Read and write I could 'tis true, nor could I truthfully say "the rule of three did puzzle me, and fractions drove me mad." English history from the great Alfred's time to poor, mad George the Third's I knew fairly well, and could, under compulsion make out from the Latin how Balbus built a wall. But it was when my father set me to the Hebrew, maintaining that a minister of the Gospel should be able to read the Law and Prophets in their original,-it was then, I say that I struck and roundly declared that a parson I would never be. And so it came that I was bound 'prentice at Wrigley Mill to learn the full craft of a master clothier, pledging myself by solemn covenant "my master well and faithfully to serve, his secrets keep, Hurt or Damage to him not to do, Alehouses and ill Company not to frequent, nor Matrimony contract." As if, commented Jim, when I read over to him these articles, a man would be likely to get wed on the "One shilling yearly for Pocket Money" which, with "Meat, Drink, Washing, Lodging, and two good Suits of Apparel as well Linen as Woollen," was all I got for working like a slave for "th' owd felly," as my master was called by his hands.