er portions, with a
thoroughness such as few professors of the science could boast at the
present day. Mill, indeed, was his prophet; and the principle of the
Greatest Happiness was his guiding star. Hankin was well abreast of
current political questions, and to every one of them he applied his
principle and managed by means of it to take a definite side. As he
worked at his last he would concentrate his mind on some chosen problem
of social reform, and would ponder, with singular pertinacity, the ways
and degrees in which alternative solutions of it would affect the
happiness of men. He would sometimes spend weeks in meditating thus on a
single problem, and, when a solution had been reached according to his
method, he made it a regular practice to go down to the Nag's Head and
announce the result, with all the prolixity of its antecedents, over a
pot of beer. It was there that I heard Hankin defend "armaments" as
conducive to the Greatest Happiness of the Greatest Number. Venturing to
assail what I thought a preposterous view, I was met by a counter attack
of horse, foot, and artillery, so well planned and vigorously sustained
that in the end I was utterly beaten from the field. Had Snarley Bob
been present, the result would have been different; indeed, there would
have been no result to the controversy at all. He would have stopped the
argument _ab initio_ by affirming in language of his own, perhaps
unprintable, that the whole question was of not the slightest importance
to anybody; that "them as built the ships, because someone had argued
'em into doing it, were fools, and them as did the arguing were bigger
fools still"; the same for those who refrained from building; that, in
short, the only way to get such questions settled was "to leave 'em to
them as knows what's what." This ignorant and undemocratic attitude
never failed to divert Hankin from argument to recrimination, which was
all the more bitter because Bob had a way of implying, mainly by the
movement of his horse-like eyes, that he himself was one of those who
knew precisely what "what" was. The upshot therefore was a row between
shepherd and shoemaker--a thing which the shepherd enjoyed in the same
degree as he hated the shoemaker's arguments.

Not the least of Mrs. Abel's improprieties was her open patronage of
Hankin. The shoemaker had established what he called an Ethical Society,
which held its meetings on Sunday afternoons in the barn of a
sympathet