lso. "I never learned anything," he wrote, "not even standing on
my head, but I found a use for it." In the spare hours of his first
telegraph voyage, to give an instance of his greed of knowledge, he
meant "to learn the whole art of navigation, every rope in the ship, and
how to handle her on any occasion"; and once when he was shown a young
lady's holiday collection of seaweeds, he must cry out, "It showed me my
eyes had been idle." Nor was his the case of the mere literary
smatterer, content if he but learn the names of things. In him, to do
and to do well was even a dearer ambition than to know. Anything done
well, any craft, despatch, or finish, delighted and inspired him. I
remember him with a twopenny Japanese box of three drawers, so exactly
fitted that, when one was driven home, the others started from their
places; the whole spirit of Japan, he told me, was pictured in that box;
that plain piece of carpentry was as much inspired by the spirit of
perfection as the happiest drawing or the finest bronze, and he who
could not enjoy it in the one was not fully able to enjoy it in the
others. Thus, too, he found in Leonardo's engineering and anatomical
drawings a perpetual feast; and of the former he spoke even with
emotion. Nothing indeed annoyed Fleeming more than the attempt to
separate the fine arts from the arts of handicraft; any definition or
theory that failed to bring these two together, according to him, had
missed the point; and the essence of the pleasure received lay in seeing
things well done. Other qualities must be added; he was the last to deny
that; but this, of perfect craft, was at the bottom of all. And on the
other hand, a nail ill driven, a joint ill fitted, a tracing clumsily
done, anything to which a man had set his hand and not set it aptly,
moved him to shame and anger. With such a character, he would feel but
little drudgery at Fairbairn's. There would be something daily to be
done, slovenliness to be avoided, and a higher mark of skill to be
attained; he would chip and file, as he had practised scales, impatient
of his own imperfection, but resolute to learn.

And there was another spring of delight. For he was now moving daily
among those strange creations of man's brain, to some so abhorrent, to
him of an interest so inexhaustible: in which iron, water, and fire are
made to serve as slaves, now with a tread more powerful than an
elephant's, and now with a touch more precise and dainty t