han a
pianist's. The taste for machinery was one that I could never share with
him, and he had a certain bitter pity for my weakness. Once when I had
proved, for the hundredth time, the depth of this defect, he looked at
me askance: "And the best of the joke," said he, "is that he thinks
himself quite a poet." For to him the struggle of the engineer against
brute forces and with inert allies was nobly poetic. Habit never dulled
in him the sense of the greatness of the aims and obstacles of his
profession. Habit only sharpened his inventor's gusto in contrivance, in
triumphant artifice, in the Odyssean subtleties, by which wires are
taught to speak, and iron hands to weave, and the slender ship to brave
and to outstrip the tempest. To the ignorant the great results alone are
admirable; to the knowing, and to Fleeming in particular, rather the
infinite device and sleight of mind that made them possible.

A notion was current at the time that, in such a shop as Fairbairn's, a
pupil would never be popular unless he drank with the workmen and
imitated them in speech and manner. Fleeming, who would do none of these
things, they accepted as a friend and companion; and this was the
subject of remark in Manchester, where some memory of it lingers till
to-day. He thought it one of the advantages of his profession to be
brought in a close relation with the working classes; and for the
skilled artisan he had a great esteem, liking his company, his virtues,
and his taste in some of the arts. But he knew the classes too well to
regard them, like a platform speaker, in a lump. He drew, on the other
hand, broad distinctions; and it was his profound sense of the
difference between one working man and another that led him to devote so
much time, in later days, to the furtherance of technical education. In
1852 he had occasion to see both men and masters at their worst, in the
excitement of a strike; and very foolishly (after their custom) both
would seem to have behaved. Beginning with a fair show of justice on
either side, the masters stultified their cause by obstinate impolicy,
and the men disgraced their order by acts of outrage. "On Wednesday
last," writes Fleeming, "about three thousand banded round Fairbairn's
door at 6 o'clock: men, women, and children, factory boys and girls, the
lowest of the low in a very low place. Orders came that no one was to
leave the works; but the men inside (Knobsticks, as they are called)
were preciou