ptor, breathing into the stone
a perfect sympathy with the heart of men. His genius grasped this, that
beauty, perfect beauty, is the typifying not of one passion, one phase of
human nature, but of the aggregation of all the moods which sway the
human mind. There is a great thought in that. It is 'the healthy mind in
the healthy body,' as the sculptor feels it. And 'the healthy mind in the
healthy body' is one of the great thoughts of the past. It is a thought
which is the priceless gift of Greek philosophy to the world. I hold it
higher than that of the Sphinx, which Ford admires so."

"What does the Sphinx mean?" asked Ned.

"Much the same, differently expressed," answered Ford. "That Life with us
is an intellectual head based on a brutish body, fecund and powerful;
that Human Nature crouches on the ground and reads the stars; that man
has a body and a mind, and that both must be cared for."

"They had a strange way of caring for both, your Egyptians," remarked
Nellie. "The people were all slaves and the rulers were all priests."

At this criticism, so naive and pithy and so like Nellie, there was a
general laugh.

"At least the priests were wise and the slaves were cared for," retorted
Ford, nothing abashed. "I recollect when I was a little fellow in
England. My people were farm labourers, west of England labourers. We
lived in a little stone cottage that had little diamond-paned windows.
The kitchen floor was below the ground, and on wet days my mother used to
make a little dam of rags at the door to keep the trickling water back.
We lived on bread and potatoes and broad beans, and not too much of that.
We got a little pig for half-a-crown, and killed it when it was grown to
pay the rent. Don't think such things are only done in Ireland! We herded
together like pigs ourselves. The women of the place often worked in the
fields. The girls, too, sometimes. You know what that means where the
people are like beasts, the spirit worn out of them. The cottages were
built two together, and our neighbour's daughter, a girl of 18 or so, had
two children. It was not thought anything. The little things played at
home with our neighbour's own small children, and their grandmother
called them hard names when they bothered her.

"My father was a bent-shouldered hopeless man, when I recollect him. He
got six shillings a week then, with a jug of cider every day. When he
stopped from the wet, and there was no work in the barns, h