spend my money on the things that matter."

So I spoke of the well and travellers' serai that I had seen. "Ah!" said he. "Yes, you have heard? To all who want it I bring water; the bridegroom water to the bride earth, and the sun above; and the earth brings forth, and the children grow fat, and all is peace. I have washed my hands in many rivers, but now I have forgotten all things . . . the old battery, and the mountain-gun, my Order of British India, the rush on the frontier, what vakeels think of the Sirkar, and whether there be Hindus, and whether The Cornhill Magazine.

there be Mussulman and a hundred names of God, or whether the English shall rule the Khalsa. All I know is that I and my wife are alive, and that it has pleased the Creator to give us life and content. Health and peace and the happiness of others, and the rest is vanity.

Mankind belongs to God, And the land to the Sirkar, And power to the mighty sahibs." And with this village saying the old man sat down, and his placid wife brought milk and chappatis, and I felt that I had heard the conclusion of the whole matter.

For some years he was only known to us as the Scissors-Grinder, an impersonal functionary who sometimes called at the back-door; a silent man with a stoop which appeared to be deferential, but which proved to be merely the result of too much pianotuning. Next we learnt he had become an inhabitant of the Alms Row, two simple and beautiful buildings of Kentish rag flanking the Grammar School, Edward VI.'s foundation. Accordingly I made my way thither with the next blades for repair. The Scissors-Grinder opened the door himself. His eyes gleamed under shaggy brows and bristling grizzled hair: he was clean-shaven, and looked like a pocketedition of the late Professor Huxley. The two little white rooms opened into each other, miracles of cleanliness and crowded with unusual pieces of furniture. A large American organ occupied the middle of the floor. A cumbrous wooden corn-mill, with hopper and sifter complete, stood in a line with the scissors-grinding machine. Both were connected with a huge driving LIVING AGE. VOL. LII. 2716

wheel, worked by a treadle. A studio camera and various other less recognizable forms were veiled in faded purple wrappers round the walls. Our two chairs and a small bare table occupied the only space left on the floor. The walls were hung with oil paintings, crudely correct. On the mantel-shelf stood an American clock, of the Sam Slick pattern, flanked by two oranges, and these, again, by two violet liniment bottles, each with a spray of scarlet sumach leaves stuck in its neck.

"I keep them there for ornament," he said. "I am passionately fond of their color, and orange is the complementary. The sumach leaves I brought with me from the United States; those are the only ones I have left, I am sorry to say. Color is my passion, especially purple, but the cover of my camera is the only piece of real purple I possess now."

He spoke of passion, but with the cold and stilted utterance of the selfeducated man. However, the lover of purple proved to be a student of Rus

kin, and must have been one of his earliest working-class disciples. It was the first of many visits. He explained his machines to me, and the pneumatic bell, his own invention. All had been put together by himself. The cornmill was accounted for by the fact of his being a vegetarian. He was likewise a republican, a free-thinker, a homœopath, phrenologist, anti-tobacconist, anti-vaccinationist, anti-vivisectionist, but not a Socialist. No; though he quoted Mr. Hyndman, and raged against the capitalist. He was. in fact, an Individualist of the narrowest and crudest type. No human being more self-centred ever breathed. His favorite topic was his prospect of earthly immortality as the result of never eating animal or mineral food (salt was taboo). He clung intensely to life, though his was dreary enough. The subject of religion he could not let alone, notwithstanding that his visitor never started it. "There is no God," he would assert angrily and quite gratuitously. "Isn't it strange, then, that people all the world over 'should be trying to worship one?"-"Yes, man is a religious animal-a religious animal, that's how I should put it. I was always an original thinker. Carlyle makes the same remark, I think-or is it Huxley? . . . Still" (after a few minutes' further conversation) "I allow the possibility of a First Cause, but as to a Providence that watches over us every moment and interferes with all we do, why the idea is-is hateful and disgusting to me!" ("Interference" was his bugbear.) "While as for worship or praying, the very idea is degrading." -“Have you never—?”—“Well, I do not deny that in moments of extremity I may have been a fool like other men; but I loathed and despised myself for it." He paused and a glow came over his face. "I will tell you my religion. When I was a lad in the spring I used to get up day after

day in the dark and walk across the park to those woods" (pointing through the window). "You can see them on the horizon. You know what they are when the wild hyacinth is in bloom?" (I did know.) "Did you ever watch those glades when the sun rose upon them the white level beams darting through between the tree-trunks? Then you don't know what I saw and felt. I used to fling myself down on my face and ache and weep with the delight of it; and that is the nearest approach I have ever felt to worship."

Harding was a true poet at heart, but utterance was denied him. He could seldom get beyond borrowed formulas, whether in speech, music, or drawing, and this gave a curious unreality even to his most genuine expressions. "I educated myself," he told me. "Seventy years ago" (this was spoken about 1890) "book-learning for a working lad was hard to come at, but I understood machinery, and I could paint and play the piano, and I gave lessons. Still, I could not make much of a living at it, so I went to the States, where piano-tuning was at a premium, and I was making money fast. But I had a brother, an epileptic, and when I was about forty he became so much worse that I had to take him to live with me. Then I had to give up piano-tuning and take to scissors-sharpening, which I could practise at home, for my brother could not be left alone for a moment. Even then I could not earn enough to keep us, attendance on him was so unremitting. I had to use up my savings. For twelve years my brother lived with me the twelve best years of my life, when I might have been making a home and business for myself. Marriage? What woman could I ask to share such a burden?" (Evidently not. the Desired One; and here surely was the secret of his bitterness.) "Then he died and I went back to my tuning, but

it jarred my spine too much and I had

to give it up. That's why I'm here now! Talk of there being a God. He ought to be ashamed of Himself if there is one. I have always done right, and this is the result. Why doesn't He provide?"

Vain and tactless was the endeavor to prove to him that it was no unkind Providence that had secured to him in his old age, and in his native town, two pretty rooms rent free, a garden plot, six shillings and eightpence a week, and perfect liberty to supplement it. The bread of charity was bitter in his mouth.

My

"Mr. Harding, the earth is full of God's providing, but we have to exert ourselves to take it. A father provides for his children, but he doesn't go round to them each with a spoon." "No, but" (with the only look and tone of tenderness he ever betrayed) "no, but he would feed the babies. brother was helpless."-"He gave you to your brother."-"Yes, and look at the result. Why should I suffer for the mistakes of Providence? But there is no Providence." And indeed this was his great quarrel with the universe that it contained no Being Whom he could debit at compound interest with his brother's maintenance for twelve years and with his own consequent losses and privations. The dread of pauper burial haunted him, and to avert it he tried to devise means of raising money. "I have some books you might like to buy." He brought out an odd volume of "Modern Painters." "My greatest treasure for years," he said wistfully handling this, "but" (pulling himself together) "my sight is failing somewhat; I can no longer see to read it." Then he produced his music-his own compositions-exquisite penmanship in handsomely bound MS. books. They were chiefly cantatas-operas he called them. One of them had a sort of re

soprano solo, I remember, written in C sharp, ended with the keynote in alt, sustained throughout eighteen bars with a cadenza ranging over two and a half octaves. They were submitted to a musical authority, who was surprised and interested. "Entirely modelled on Mozart or Bach," was his verdict. "The counterpoint is simply amazing, but there is no melody or beauty of any kind." I reported what discretion permitted, and my friend was much gratified. "A great musician in the States told me somewhat the same. He said, "There is no living composer who could write such music as yours, and if there were, there are no vocalists nowadays who could sing it.'" Next we tried the freehand drawings, elaborate patterns for ground glass windows. "They took me a long time," he said sadly, rolling them up, "and now I am afraid that, after all, the only good of them was the pleasure of doing it. But as to destroying them, I couldn't. It would be like tearing up my own heart. Have you seen my table-my magnum opus?" He reverently unwrapped a round table, the top of which worked on a hinge. It was a masterpiece indeed! Painted on a ground of Brunswick black, the design, which covered every inch of surface, consisted in rows of flowers arranged in concentric circles round the centre, a violently pink heraldic rose. "The colors chosen were primary and secondary tints," he remarked. Unmistakably they were. Alas! the general effect was appalling-a miracle of delicate futility and misapplied industry. Nothing concealed that was done, but all things done to adorning Meanest utilities seized as occasions to grace and embellish.

For instance, the grooved line of every screw-head used in the construction had been neatly painted white, with a little sprig of mustard and cress

springing from either side. Above or below, one found no escape from the exuberance of ornament-the trail of the convolvulus was over it all. "I would take six guineas for it, but there is no taste for such things in this neighborhood." He covered it up again with set lips, and turned to another favorite topic-vegetarian cookery. The machines proved to be his only available assets, his strength being no longer equal to the work they demanded. But the loss of his mill did not drive him to the trade for wholemeal flour; he distrusted it too much. He took to haricot beans instead. His independent nature would not accept the smallest service without requital, so the offering of a basket of strawberries or a bag of oranges always met with some return in the shape of a gardening magazine or a cookery recipe neatly inscribed. This was one of them: "The beans will take some hours to cook thoroughly. Put them on at nine o'clock, with the saucepan-handle pointing due east. At ten o'clock turn it to the south, at eleven to the west, and at twelve to the north. By one o'clock they should be ready for eating. This plan will ensure every portion being thoroughly done."-"Wouldn't it answer the same purpose if one stirred them now and The Spectator.

then?"-"Perhaps it might. But I had never thought of that. At any rate the same regularity would not attend that process." Which nobody could deny.

Our friendship extended over several years, during which his faculties sensibly declined. When we left the neighborhood a friend-an Indian frontier officer-promised to look after him. The profession of arms was the object of the Scissors-Grinder's deepest contempt. Nevertheless-by what magic of persuasion I know not-the Irish Colonel won permission, not only to visit him, but to read the New Testament. Mr. Harding would sit enduring it with polite indifference, deepening into apathy as paralysis gradually benumbed his senses. One day he in

ago.

once

suppose.

.

terrupted the reading: "Pardon me, would you be kind enough to repeat that?" It was the Parable of the Prodigal Son. "I seem to have heard that before somewhere, long When I was a boy I I wished to hear it again. Thank you, nothing further at present." It was the last flash of that keen intelligence. On the Colonel's next visit-so he told me he found Harding paralyzed and unconscious, but whether or not he was buried by the parish we could never ascertain. R. B.

I did not intend to read anything at all when I entered the club that day; I wanted to write a letter. But it was lying open on the chair, and so I picked it up.

I am inclined to believe now that it was put there as a trap.

It was a weekly paper and five days old at that, so I passed hastily and forgivingly over the racing column, in

which "The Newmarket Nut" had given two non-runners and three losers as his selections for the previous day's

races.

Then I came to a column headed "Man and his Dress," written by one who styled himself "West-end Lounger"-a nom-de-guerre which attracted me at once by the careless grace with which it admitted human

frailties in one of exalted social station.

Most of this column was taken up with Answers to Correspondents, and it was Answer No. 3 which led to all my trouble.

It ran thus: "Enquirer,-Certainly not; no man with the slightest pretensions to being decently dressed would ever dream of having more than two buttons on the cuff of a lounge suit." One felt that "Enquirer" must be having a bad time of it; but so dignified and crushing was the rebuke to his artless query that at first my sympathy for him was tinged with contempt.

I pictured him as a pushing man, with no taste and little tact; doubtless an honest man according to his lights, but-well, anyway he had been put in his place now.

Then, without warning, one of those pangs of self-doubt that come to the best of us at times, stabbed through

me.

I dropped the paper and looked at my own cuffs-a thing I don't remember doing before, except when I am playing golf.

I counted them carefully; then I read that reply to "Enquirer" again; then 1 counted them two or three times, covering each button with the paper when I had finished counting it, so as to make quite sure.

When I had checked my calculations. I found that I had, without any question, three buttons on each cuff; and the suit I was wearing was one of the most distinctly lounge suits I have seen for a long time.

I put my hands and as much of my sleeves as possible into my coat pockets, and slunk into the hall. A few men greeted me as I passed, but I hur ried on; their eyes seemed to be looking for that extra button, and I wondered how long they had really known about it. I thought it would have been so much kinder, in the long run, if

someone had spoken out about it before.

I emerged into the street with the intention of going straight to my tailor and getting debuttoned. (That is a trade term I invented on the way.)

I reflected, as I walked, that I must be more strict with my tailor in future and not be put off with airy assurances that "They" are wearing certain things.

As a matter of fact I don't remember being consulted at all as to the number of buttons on my cuffs.

A very neatly-dressed man in a lounge suit passed me in Pall Mall, and I turned and followed him bending outwards (i.e., towards the road) to see if I could count his buttons. I had just caught the flash of one of them when a policeman began to watch me norrowly. So I abandoned the pursuit and went on my way, whistling wanly.

Then I met Jones, and gripped his hand. "Jones," I gasped, "how many buttons have you got on your coat cuffs?"

He fixed his eyes on me and repeated my question in a thoughtful way once or twice.

"I give it up," he said at last. "Is it a riddle?"

"It is no riddle," I said sadly. "It is a very serious matter. Quick-how many?"

"I'm hanged if I know-it may be anything from one to half-a-dozen-or there may not be any at all. I have never been able to see them from where I am."

He screwed his right arm round as he spoke, and I counted them carefully -Jones checking me as I numbered them off.

"Four!" I shouted. "Why, you're worse than I am!" and I grasped his hand again.

It was selfish, no doubt, to show my pleasure in his degradation so openly, but it is so comforting to know that one