a platter--I will model one for you when I go home." This
helped things a little, and the girl offered to show him the garden.
There were no flowers in Burslem. People had no time to take care of
them.

And just then the Squire appeared, bluff, bold and hearty, and soon
everything was all right. That evening the young lady played for them on
the harpsichord; the father told stories and laughed heartily at them
because nobody else did; and Josiah seated in a dim corner recited pages
from Thomson's "Seasons," and the next day was frightened at his
temerity.

* * * * *

When Josiah returned to Burslem, it was with the firm determination that
he must get away from his brother and branch out for himself. That he
loved Sarah or had any idea of wedding her, he was not conscious. Yet
her life to him was a great living presence, and all of his plans for
the future were made with her in mind. Brown butter-crocks were
absolutely out of the question! It was blue plates, covered with vines
and roses, or nothing; and he even had visions of a tea-set covered with
cupids and flying angels.

In a few weeks we find Josiah over near Sheffield making knife-handles
for a Mr. Harrison, an ambitious cutler. Harrison lacked the art spirit
and was found too mercenary for our young man, who soon after formed a
partnership with a man named Whieldon, "to make tortoise-shell and ivory
from ground flint and other stones by processes secret to said
Wedgwood." Whieldon furnished the money and Wedgwood the skill. Up to
this time the pottery business in England had consisted in using the
local clays. Wedgwood invented a mill for grinding stone, and
experimented with every kind of rock he could lay his hands on.

He also became a skilled modeler, and his success at ornamenting the
utensils and pretty things they made caused the business to prosper. In
a year he had saved up a hundred pounds of his own. This certainly was
quite a fortune, and Sarah had written him, "I am so proud of your
success--we all predict for you a great future."

Such assurances had a sort of undue weight with Josiah, for we find him
not long after making bold to call on Squire Wedgwood on "a matter of
most important business."

The inspired reader need not be told what that business was. Just let it
go that the Squire told Josiah he was a fool to expect that the only
daughter of Richard Wedgwood, Esquire, retired monger in Cheshire
cheese,