‘No, I wasn’t, sir!’ cried Bitzer. ‘Not till she run away from me. But the horse-riders never mind what they say, sir; they’re famous for it. You know the horse-riders are famous for never minding what they say,’ addressing Sissy. ‘It’s as well known in the town as—please, sir, as the multiplication table isn’t known to the horse-riders.’ Bitzer tried Mr. Bounderby with this.

‘He frightened me so,’ said the girl, ‘with his cruel faces!’

‘Oh!’ cried Bitzer. ‘Oh! An’t you one of the rest! An’t you a horse-rider! I never looked at her, sir. I asked her if she would know how to define a horse to-morrow, and offered to tell her again, and she ran away, and I ran after her, sir, that she might know how to answer when she was asked. You wouldn’t have thought of saying such mischief if you hadn’t been a horse-rider?’

‘Her calling seems to be pretty well known among ’em,’ observed Mr. Bounderby. ‘You’d have had the whole school peeping in a row, in a week.’

‘Truly, I think so,’ returned his friend. ‘Bitzer, turn you about and take yourself home. Jupe, stay here a moment. Let me hear of your running in this manner any more, boy, and you will hear of me through the master of the school. You understand what I mean. Go along.’

The boy stopped in his rapid blinking, knuckled his forehead again, glanced at Sissy, turned about, and retreated.

‘Now, girl,’ said Mr. Gradgrind, ‘take this gentleman and me to your father’s; we are going there. What have you got in that bottle you are carrying?’

‘Gin,’ said Mr. Bounderby.

‘Dear, no, sir! It’s the nine oils.’

‘The what?’ cried Mr. Bounderby.

‘The nine oils, sir, to rub father with.’

‘Then,’ said Mr. Bounderby, with a loud short laugh, ‘what the devil do you rub your father with nine oils for?’

‘It’s what our people aways use, sir, when they get any hurts in the ring,’ replied the girl, looking over her shoulder, to assure herself that her pursuer was gone. ‘They bruise themselves very bad sometimes.’

‘Serve ’em right,’ said Mr. Bounderby, ‘for being idle.’ She glanced up at his face, with mingled astonishment and dread.

‘By George!’ said Mr. Bounderby, ‘when I was four or five years younger than you, I had worse bruises upon me than ten oils, twenty oils, forty oils, would have rubbed off. I didn’t get ’em by posture-making, but by being banged about. There was no rope-dancing for me; I danced on the bare ground and was larruped with the rope.’

Mr. Gradgrind, though hard enough, was by no means so rough a man as Mr. Bounderby. His character was not unkind, all things considered; it might have been a very kind one indeed, if he had only made some round mistake in the arithmetic that balanced it, years ago. He said, in what he meant for a reassuring tone, as they turned down a narrow road, ‘And this is Pod’s End; is it, Jupe?’