"If you please, sir," said Willie.

"Ha! are you good at writing and ciphering?"

"Middlin', sir."

"Hum! D'you know where my office is, and what it is?"

"No, sir."

"What would you say now," asked Mr Tippet, seating himself on his
bench, or rather on the top of a number of gimblets and chisels and
files and pincers that lay on it; "what would you say now to sitting
from morning till night in a dusty ware-room, where the light is so
feeble that it can scarcely penetrate the dirt that encrusts the
windows, writing in books that are so greasy that the ink can hardly be
got to mark the paper? How would you like that, William Willders--eh?"

"I don't know, sir," replied Willie, with a somewhat depressed look.

"Of course you don't, yet that is the sort of place you'd have to work
in, boy, if I engaged you, for that is a correct description of my
warehouse. I'm a sleeping partner in the firm. D'ye know what that is,
boy?"

"No, sir."

"Well, it's a partner that does no work; but I'm wide-awake for all
that, an' have a pretty good notion of what is going on there. Now,
lad, if I were to take you in, what would you say to 5 pounds a year?"

"It don't sound much, sir," said Willie bluntly, "but if you take me in
with the understandin' that I'm to work my way up'ards, I don't mind
about the pay at first."

"Good," said Mr Tippet, with a nod of approval. "What d'ye think of my
workshop?" he added, looking round with a cherubic smile.

"It's a funny place," responded Willie, with a grin.

"A funny place--eh? Well, I daresay it is, lad, in your eyes; but let
me tell you, it is a place of deep interest, and, I may add without
vanity, importance. There are inventions here, all in a state bordering
more or less upon completion, which will, when brought into operation,
modify the state of society very materially in many of its most
prominent phases. Here, for instance, is a self-acting
galvano-hydraulic engine, which will entirely supersede the use of
steam, and, by preventing the consumption of coal now going on, will
avert, or at least postpone, the decline of the British Empire. Able
men have calculated that, in the course of a couple of hundred years or
so, our coal-beds will be exhausted. I have gone over their
calculations and detected several flaws in them, which, when corrected,
show a very different result--namely, that in seventeen or eighteen
years from this time there will not be an ounce of c