ds, and steam ploughs, and electric telegraphs, and
all the things which you see in the Great Exhibition; and to foretell
famine, and bad weather, and the price of stocks and (what is hardest of
all) the next vagary of the great idol Whirligig, which some call Public
Opinion; till at last he grew as rich as a Jew, and as fat as a farmer,
and people thought twice before they meddled with him, but only once
before they asked him to help them; for, because he earned his money
well, he could afford to spend it well likewise.

"And his children are the men of science, who get good lasting work done
in the world; but the children of Prometheus are the fanatics, and the
theorists, and the bigots, and the bores, and the noisy windy people,
who go telling silly folk what will happen, instead of looking to see
what has happened already."

Now, was not Mother Carey's a wonderful story? And, I am happy to say,
Tom believed it every word.

For so it happened to Tom likewise. He was very sorely tried; for
though, by keeping the dog to heels (or rather to toes, for he had to
walk backward), he could see pretty well which way the dog was hunting,
yet it was much slower work to go backwards than to go forwards. But,
what was more trying still, no sooner had he got out of Peacepool, than
there came running to him all the conjurers, fortune-tellers,
astrologers, prophesiers, projectors, prestigiators, as many as were in
those parts (and there are too many of them everywhere), Old Mother
Shipton on her broomstick, with Merlin, Thomas the Rhymer, Gerbertus,
Rabanus Maurus, Nostradamus, Zadkiel, Raphael, Moore, Old Nixon, and a
good many in black coats and white ties who might have known better,
considering in what century they were born, all bawling and screaming at
him, "Look a-head, only look a-head; and we will show you what man never
saw before, and right away to the end of the world!"

But I am proud to say that, though Tom had not been to Cambridge--for,
if he had, he would have certainly been senior wrangler--he was such a
little dogged, hard, gnarly, foursquare brick of an English boy, that he
never turned his head round once all the way from Peacepool to the
Other-end-of-Nowhere: but kept his eye on the dog, and let him pick out
the scent, hot or cold, straight or crooked, wet or dry, up hill or down
dale; by which means he never made a single mistake, and saw all the
wonderful and hitherto by-no-mortal-man-imagined things, whic