proprietors there might be something in it. Perhaps it helped a man into
Parliament, Parliament still being a confused retrogressive corner
in the world where lawyers and suchlike sheltered themselves from the
onslaughts of common-sense behind a fog of Latin and Greek and twaddle
and tosh; but I wasn't the sort to go into Parliament, unless I meant to
be a lawyer. Did I mean to be a lawyer? It cost no end of money, and
was full of uncertainties, and there were no judges nor great solicitors
among my relations. "Young chaps think they get on by themselves," said
my uncle. "It isn't so. Not unless they take their coats off. I took
mine off before I was your age by nigh a year."

We were at cross purposes from the outset, because I did not think men
lived to make money; and I was obtuse to the hints he was throwing out
at the possibilities of his own potbank, not willfully obtuse, but just
failing to penetrate his meaning. Whatever City Merchants had or had
not done for me, Flack, Topham and old Gates had certainly barred my
mistaking the profitable production and sale of lavatory basins and
bathroom fittings for the highest good. It was only upon reflection that
it dawned upon me that the splendid chance for a young fellow with my
uncle, "me, having no son of my own," was anything but an illustration
for comparison with my own chosen career.

I still remember very distinctly my uncle's talk,--he loved to speak
"reet Staffordshire"--his rather flabby face with the mottled complexion
that told of crude ill-regulated appetites, his clumsy gestures--he kept
emphasising his points by prodding at me with his finger--the ill-worn,
costly, grey tweed clothes, the watch chain of plain solid gold, and
soft felt hat thrust back from his head. He tackled me first in the
garden after lunch, and then tried to raise me to enthusiasm by taking
me to his potbank and showing me its organisation, from the dusty
grinding mills in which whitened men worked and coughed, through the
highly ventilated glazing room in which strangely masked girls looked
ashamed of themselves,--"They'll risk death, the fools, to show their
faces to a man," said my uncle, quite audibly--to the firing kilns and
the glazing kilns, and so round the whole place to the railway siding
and the gratifying spectacle of three trucks laden with executed orders.

Then we went up a creaking outside staircase to his little office, and
he showed off before me for a while, with o