AT MANCHESTER 63 



and bad language.' But the police cleared a lane 

 through the crowd, the pupils were suffered to 

 escape unhurt, and only the Knobsticks followed 

 home and kicked with clogs ; so that Fleeming 

 enjoyed, as we may say, for nothing, that fine thrill 

 of expectant valour with which he had sallied forth 

 into the mob. * I never before felt myself so 

 decidedly somebody, instead of nobody,' he wrote. 



Outside as inside the works, he was ' pretty merry Dr. Bell 

 and well to do,' zealous in study, welcome to many architec- 

 friends, unwearied in loving-kindness to his mother. 

 For some time he spent three nights a week with 

 Dr. Bell, ' working away at certain geometrical 

 methods of getting the Greek architectural pro- 

 portions ' : a business after Fleeming's heart, for 

 he was never so pleased as when he could marry 

 his two devotions, art and science. This was besides, 

 in all likelihood, the beginning of that love and 

 intimate appreciation of things Greek, from the 

 least to the greatest, from the Agamemnon (perhaps 

 his favourite tragedy) down to the details of Grecian 

 tailoring, which he used to express in his familiar 

 phrase : ' The Greeks were the boys.' Dr. Bell 

 the son of George Joseph, the nephew of Sir Charles, 

 and though he made less use of it than some, a 

 sharer in the distinguished talents of his race had 

 hit upon the singular fact that certain geometrical 

 intersections gave the proportions of the Doric 

 order. Fleeming, under Dr. Bell's direction, applied 



