there.«
    »Never mind Merrylegs, Jupe,« said Mr. Gradgrind, with a passing frown. »I
don't ask about him. I understand you to have been in the habit of reading to
your father?«
    »O, yes, sir, thousands of times. They were the happiest - O, of all the
happy times we had together, sir!«
    It was only now when her sorrow broke out, that Louisa looked at her.
    »And what,« asked Mr. Gradgrind, in a still lower voice, »did you read to
your father, Jupe?«
    »About the Fairies, sir, and the Dwarf, and the Hunchback, and the Genies,«
she sobbed out; »and about -«
    »Hush!« said Mr. Gradgrind, »that is enough. Never breathe a word of such
destructive nonsense any more. Bounderby, this is a case for rigid training, and
I shall observe it with interest.«
    »Well,« returned Mr. Bounderby, »I have given you my opinion already, and I
shouldn't do as you do. But, very well, very well. Since you are bent upon it,
very well!«
    So, Mr. Gradgrind and his daughter took Cecilia Jupe off with them to Stone
Lodge, and on the way Louisa never spoke one word, good or bad. And Mr.
Bounderby went about his daily pursuits. And Mrs. Sparsit got behind her
eyebrows and meditated in the gloom of that retreat, all the evening.
 

                                  Chapter VIII

                                  Never Wonder

Let us strike the key-note again, before pursuing the tune.
    When she was half a dozen years younger, Louisa had been overheard to begin
a conversation with her brother one day, by saying »Tom, I wonder« - upon which
Mr. Gradgrind, who was the person overhearing, stepped forth into the light and
said, »Louisa, never wonder!«
    Herein lay the spring of the mechanical art and mystery of educating the
reason without stooping to the cultivation of the sentiments and affections.
Never wonder. By means of addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division,
settle everything somehow, and never wonder. Bring to me, says M'Choakumchild,
yonder baby just able to walk, and I will engage that it shall never wonder.
    Now, besides very many babies just able to walk, there happened to be in
Coketown a considerable population of babies who had been walking against time
towards the infinite world, twenty, thirty, forty, fifty years and more. These
portentous infants