Hard Times | Page 4

girl?'
'Sissy Jupe, sir,' explained number twenty, blushing, standing up, and curtseying.
'Sissy is not a name,' said Mr. Gradgrind. 'Don't call yourself Sissy. Call yourself Cecilia.'
'It's father as calls me Sissy, sir,' returned the young girl in a trembling voice, and with
another curtsey.
'Then he has no business to do it,' said Mr. Gradgrind. 'Tell him he mustn't. Cecilia Jupe.
Let me see. What is your father?'
'He belongs to the horse-riding, if you please, sir.'
Mr. Gradgrind frowned, and waved off the objectionable calling with his hand.
'We don't want to know anything about that, here. You mustn't tell us about that, here.
Your father breaks horses, don't he?'
'If you please, sir, when they can get any to break, they do break horses in the ring, sir.'
'You mustn't tell us about the ring, here. Very well, then. Describe your father as a
horsebreaker. He doctors sick horses, I dare say?'
'Oh yes, sir.'
'Very well, then. He is a veterinary surgeon, a farrier, and horsebreaker. Give me your
definition of a horse.'

(Sissy Jupe thrown into the greatest alarm by this demand.)
'Girl number twenty unable to define a horse!' said Mr. Gradgrind, for the general behoof
of all the little pitchers. 'Girl number twenty possessed of no facts, in reference to one of
the commonest of animals! Some boy's definition of a horse. Bitzer, yours.'
The square finger, moving here and there, lighted suddenly on Bitzer, perhaps because he
chanced to sit in the same ray of sunlight which, darting in at one of the bare windows of
the intensely white-washed room, irradiated Sissy. For, the boys and girls sat on the face
of the inclined plane in two compact bodies, divided up the centre by a narrow interval;
and Sissy, being at the corner of a row on the sunny side, came in for the beginning of a
sunbeam, of which Bitzer, being at the corner of a row on the other side, a few rows in
advance, caught the end. But, whereas the girl was so dark-eyed and dark-haired, that she
seemed to receive a deeper and more lustrous colour from the sun, when it shone upon
her, the boy was so light-eyed and light-haired that the self-same rays appeared to draw
out of him what little colour he ever possessed. His cold eyes would hardly have been
eyes, but for the short ends of lashes which, by bringing them into immediate contrast
with something paler than themselves, expressed their form. His short-cropped hair might
have been a mere continuation of the sandy freckles on his forehead and face. His skin
was so unwholesomely deficient in the natural tinge, that he looked as though, if he were
cut, he would bleed white.
'Bitzer,' said Thomas Gradgrind. 'Your definition of a horse.'
'Quadruped. Graminivorous. Forty teeth, namely twenty-four grinders, four eye-teeth,
and twelve incisive. Sheds coat in the spring; in marshy countries, sheds hoofs, too.
Hoofs hard, but requiring to be shod with iron. Age known by marks in mouth.' Thus
(and much more) Bitzer.
'Now girl number twenty,' said Mr. Gradgrind. 'You know what a horse is.'
She curtseyed again, and would have blushed deeper, if she could have blushed deeper
than she had blushed all this time. Bitzer, after rapidly blinking at Thomas Gradgrind
with both eyes at once, and so catching the light upon his quivering ends of lashes that
they looked like the antennae of busy insects, put his knuckles to his freckled forehead,
and sat down again.
The third gentleman now stepped forth. A mighty man at cutting and drying, he was; a
government officer; in his way (and in most other people's too), a professed pugilist;
always in training, always with a system to force down the general throat like a bolus,
always to be heard of at the bar of his little Public-office, ready to fight all England. To
continue in fistic phraseology, he had a genius for coming up to the scratch, wherever and
whatever it was, and proving himself an ugly customer. He would go in and damage any
subject whatever with his right, follow up with his left, stop, exchange, counter, bore his
opponent (he always fought All England) to the ropes, and fall upon him neatly. He was
certain to knock the wind out of common sense, and render that unlucky adversary deaf
to the call of time. And he had it in charge from high authority to bring about the great

public-office Millennium, when Commissioners should reign upon earth.
'Very well,' said this gentleman, briskly smiling, and folding his arms. 'That's a horse.
Now, let me ask you girls and boys, Would you paper a room with representations of
horses?'
After a pause, one half of the children cried in chorus, 'Yes,