ence, George."

He would Zzzz, with his glasses reflecting the red of the glowing coals.

"No good hiding our light under a Bushel," he would remark.

I never really determined whether my uncle regarded Tono-Bungay as a
fraud, or whether he didn't come to believe in it in a kind of way by
the mere reiteration of his own assertions. I think that his average
attitude was one of kindly, almost parental, toleration. I remember
saying on one occasion, "But you don't suppose this stuff ever did a
human being the slightest good all?" and how his face assumed a look of
protest, as of one reproving harshness and dogmatism.

"You've a hard nature, George," he said. "You're too ready to run things
down. How can one TELL? How can one venture to TELL!..."

I suppose any creative and developing game would have interested me
in those years. At any rate, I know I put as much zeal into this
Tono-Bungay as any young lieutenant could have done who suddenly found
himself in command of a ship. It was extraordinarily interesting to me
to figure out the advantage accruing from this shortening of the process
or that, and to weigh it against the capital cost of the alteration. I
made a sort of machine for sticking on the labels, that I patented; to
this day there is a little trickle of royalties to me from that. I also
contrived to have our mixture made concentrated, got the bottles, which
all came sliding down a guarded slant-way, nearly filled with distilled
water at one tap, and dripped our magic ingredients in at the next. This
was an immense economy of space for the inner sanctum. For the bottling
we needed special taps, and these, too, I invented and patented.

We had a sort of endless band of bottles sliding along an inclined glass
trough made slippery with running water. At one end a girl held them up
to the light, put aside any that were imperfect and placed the others in
the trough; the filling was automatic; at the other end a girl slipped
in the cork and drove it home with a little mallet. Each tank, the
little one for the vivifying ingredients and the big one for distilled
water, had a level indicator, and inside I had a float arrangement that
stopped the slide whenever either had sunk too low. Another girl stood
ready with my machine to label the corked bottles and hand them to the
three packers, who slipped them into their outer papers and put them,
with a pad of corrugated paper between each pair, into a little groove
from