Page:Eliot - Felix Holt, the Radical, vol. I, 1866.djvu/251

Rh labour for which he had a more sympathetic fibre than for any ribbon in the button-hole—if he could move these men to save something from their drink and pay a schoolmaster for their boys, a greater service would be done them than if Mr Garstin and his company were persuaded to establish a school.

"I'll lay hold of them by their fatherhood," said Felix; "I'll take one of their little fellows and set him in the midst. Till they can show there's something they love better than swilling themselves with ale, extension of the suffrage can never mean anything for them but extension of boozing. One must begin somewhere: I'll begin at what is under my nose. I'll begin at Sproxton. That's what a man would do if he had a red-hot superstition. Can't one work for sober truth as hard as for megrims?"

Felix Holt had his illusions, like other young men, though they were not of a fashionable sort; referring neither to the impression his costume and horsemanship might make on beholders, nor to the ease with which he would pay the Jews when he gave a loose to his talents and applied himself to work. He had fixed his choice on a certain Mike Brindle (not that Brindle was his real name—each collier had his sobriquet) as the man whom he would induce to walk part of the way home with him this