Colin Churchill\'s first delight at the wood-carver\'s at Exeter was of the sort that a man rarely feels twice in a lifetime. It was the joy of first emancipation. Hitherto, Colin had been only a servant, and had looked forward to a life of service. Not despondently or gloomily—for Colin was a son of the people, and he accepted servitude as his natural guerdon—but blankly and without eagerness or repining. The children of the labouring class expect to walk through life in their humble way as through a set task, where a man may indeed sometimes meet with stray episodes of pleasure (especially that one human episode of love-making), but where for the most part he will come across nothing whatsoever save interminable rules and regulations. Now, however, Colin felt himself free and happy: he had got a trade and a career before him, and a trade and a career into which he could throw himself with his utmost ardour. For the first time in his life Colin began dimly to feel that he too had something in him. How could he possibly have got up an enthusiasm about the vicar\'s boots, or about the proper way to deliver letters on a silver salver? But when it came to carving roses and plums out of solid mahogany or walnut, why, that of course was a very different sort of matter.

Even at Wootton Mandeville, the boy had somehow suspected, in his vague inarticulate fashion (for the English agricultural class has no tongue in which to express itself), that he too had artistic taste and power. When he heard the vicar talking to his friends about paintings or engravings, he recognised that he could understand and appreciate all that the vicar said; nay, more: on two or three occasions he had even boldly ventured to conceive that he saw certain things in certain pictures which the vicar, in his cold, dry, formal fashion, with his coldly critical folding eyeglass, could never have dreamt of or imagined. In his heart of hearts, even then, the boy somehow half-knew that the vicar saw what the vicar was capable of seeing in each work, but that he, Colin Churchill the pageboy, penetrated into the very inmost feeling and meaning of the original artist. So much, in his inarticulate way, the boy had sometimes surprised himself by dimly fancying; but as he had no language in which to speak such things, even to himself, and only slowly learnt that language afterwards, he didn\'t formulate his ideas in his own head for a single minute, allowing them merely to rest there in the inchoate form of shapeless feeling.

Now, at Exeter, however, all this was quite altered. In the aisles of the great cathedral, looking up at the many-coloured saints in the windows, and listening to the long notes of the booming organ, Colin Churchill\'s soul awoke and knew itself. The gift that was in him was not one to be used for himself alone, a mere knack of painting pictures to decorate the bare walls of his bedroom, or of making clay images for little Minna to stick upon the fisherman\'s wooden mantelshelf: it was a talent admired and recognised of other people, and to be employed for the noble and useful purposes of carving pine-apple posts for walnut bedsteads or conventional scrolls for fashionable chimneypieces. To such great heights did emancipated Colin Churchill now aspire. Even his master allowed him to see that he thought well of him. The boy was given tools to work with, and instructed in the use of them; and he learnt how to employ them so fast that the master openly expressed his surprise and satisfaction. In a very few weeks Colin was fairly through the first stage of learning, and was set to produce bits of scroll work from his own design, for a wainscoted room in the house of a resident canon.

For seven months Colin went on at his wood-carving with unalloyed delight, and wrote every week to tell Minna how much he liked the work, and what beautiful wooden things he would now be able to make her. But at the end of those seven months, as luck would have it (whether good luck or ill luck the future must say), Colin chanced to fall in one day with a strange companion. One afternoon a heavy-looking Italian workman dropped casually into the workshop where Colin Churchill was busy carving. The boy was cutting the leaves of a honeysuckle spray from life for a long moulding. The Italian watched him closely for a while, and then he said in his liquid English: \'Zat is good. You can carve, mai boy. You must come and see me at mai place. I wawrk for Smeez and Whatgood.\'

Colin turned round, blushing with pleasure, and looked at the Italian. He couldn\'t tell why, but somehow in his heart instinctively, he felt more proud of that workman\'s simple expression of satisfaction at his work than he had felt even when the vicar told him, in his stiff, condescending, depreciatory manner, that there was \'some merit in the bas-relief and drawings.\' Smith and Whatgood were stonecutters in the town, who did a large trade in tombstones and \'monumental statuary.\' No doubt the Italian was one of their artistic hands, and Colin took his praise with a flush of sympathetic pleasure. It was handicraftsman speaking critically and appreciatively of handicraftsman.

\'What\'s your name, sir?\' he asked the man, politely.

\'You could not pronounce it,\' answered the Italian, smiling and showing his two fine rows of pure white teeth: \'Giuseppe Cicolari. You cannot pronounce it.\'

\'Giuseppe Cicolari,\' the boy repeated slowly, with the precise intonation the Italian had given it, for he had the gift of vocal imitation, like all men of Celtic blood (and the Dorsetshire peasant is mainly Celtic). \'Giuseppe Cicolari! a pretty name. Da you carve figures for Smith and Whatgood?\'

\'I am zair sculptor,\' th............