AT MANCHESTER 61 



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 than a pian- 

 ist'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 his aims and obstacles of his pro- 

 fession. 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 



