eek ago in the triangle under the sycamore
tree. And she said, 'Those who do understand don't care, and those who
don't understand, don't matter'--so there you are--one's left all
alone."

"I'm sure you ain't--more's Sabina. She's got lots of friends, and
you've got your dear wife and children," said Nelly.

"I have; but the mind sometimes takes a flight above one's family. It's
summed up in a word: there's nothing so damned unpleasant as being took
for granted, and that's what's the matter with me."

"Not in your home, you ain't," declared Sarah. "No good, sensible wife
takes her husband for granted. He's always made a bit of a fuss over
under his own roof."

"That's true; but in my business I am. To see people--I'll name no
names--to see other people purred over, and then to find your own craft
treated as just a commonplace of Nature, no more wonderful than the
leaves on a bush--beastly, I call it."

Mr. Legg had joined them and he admitted the force of the argument.

"We're very inclined to put our own job higher in the order of the
universe than will other people," he said; "and better men than you have
hungered for a bit of notice and a pat on the back and never won it. But
time covers that trouble. I grant, all the same, that it's a bit galling
when we find the world turns a cold shoulder to our best."

"It's a human weakness, Nicholas, to want to be patted," said Nelly, and
her husband agreed.

"It is. We share it with dogs," he declared. "But the world in general
is too busy to pat us. I remember in my green youth being very proud of
myself once and pointing to a lot of pewter in a tub, that I'd worked up
till it looked like silver; and I took some credit, and an old man in
the bar said that scouring pots was nothing more than scouring pots, and
that any other honest fool could have done them just as well as me."

"That's all right and I don't pretend my work on the lathe is a national
asset, and I don't pretend I ought to have a statue for doing it,"
answered Nicholas; "but what I do say is that I am greater than my lathe
and ought to get more attention according. I am a man and not a
cog-wheel, and when Ironsyde puts cog-wheels above men and gives a dumb
machine greater praise than the mechanic who works it--then it's wrong
and I don't like it."

"He can't make any such mistake as that," argued Job. "It's rumoured
he's going to stand for Parliament at the next General Election, so his
business is w