To become able to make something is, I think, necessary to thorough development. I would rather have a son of mine a carpenter, a watchmaker, a woodcarver, a shoemaker, a jeweller, a blacksmith, a bookbinder, than have him earn his living as a clerk in a bank. Not merely is the cultivation of such skills a better education in things human, it brings a man nearer to everything practical. Humanity unfolds itself to him the readier, its ways and thoughts and modes of being grow the clearer to both intellect and heart. The poetry of life, the inner side of nature, rises near the surface to meet the eyes of the man who makes. What advantage the carpenter of Nazareth gathered at his bench is the inheritance of every workman in proportion as he does divine—that is, honest—work.

Perceiving the faculty of the boy, Tuke naturally thought it a good thing to bring him along in his trade—it would always be a possession, whatever turn things might take. And certainly the man who can gather his food off his own bench, or screw it out of his own press, must be a freer man than he who but for an inheritance would have to beg, steal, or die of hunger.

Under the watchful encouragement of his father, then, and with his great love of reading and of books, Richard delightedly entered into his apprenticeship. While still too young to wield the hammer without danger to both himself and the book in his care, the boy began to sew, and in a few weeks he was able to bring the sheets together entirely to his father’s satisfaction. From the first, he set himself to do whatever work he was doing in the best way. John Tuke went on teaching him until the boy could do almost everything better than himself, until he had taught him every delicacy, every secret of the craft. Richard developed a positive genius for the work, a genius reflected, as he developed, in his powers of resurrection in working with antique volumes.

The elder came to regard with wonder and admiration the redeeming faculty of the younger. But in many ways Tuke was still a man of this world, and he sorely doubted if such labour would ever produce much income. It was much easier, and therefore paid better, to reclothe than to restore! He recognized that his son was possessed of a quite original faculty for book-healing. “But alas!” he thought, “he will never be paid for the time it takes.”

Nevertheless, he continued to encourage him, though mildly, in the pursuit of this neglected branch of the binding art. Through his long connections with book-lovers who possessed small cherished libraries, Tuke was able to bring Richard almost as many jobs as he could handle.

But however much the youth delighted in it, he could not but find the work tiring. It was often necessary to leave it for a walk or a solitary hour on the river. He had few companions—his parents were strangely careful about his friendships. The elder Tuke held strong socialistic opinions but was, like the holders of so many higher theories, apt to forget the practice necessarily involved in his viewpoints, particularly where Richard was concerned.