hing at all preaching of hygiene, as usual, as "stuff."

There were several other gentlemen in the room,--waiting, apparently,
for something,--reading the morning papers, playing with the
Newfoundland dog that had curled himself up in the patch of sunshine by
the window, or chatting with Miss Defourchet. None of them, she saw,
were men of cultured leisure: one or two millionnaires, burly,
stubby-nosed fellows, with practised eyes and Port-hinting faces: the
class of men whose money was made thirty years back, who wear slouched
clothes, and wield the coarser power in the States. They came out to the
talk fit for a lady, on the open general field, in a lumbering, soggy
way, the bank-note smell on every thought. The others, more unused to
society, caught its habit better, she thought, belonging as they did to
a higher order: they were practical mechanicians, and their profession
called, she knew, for tolerably powerful and facile faculties of brain.
The young lady, who was waiting too, though not so patiently as the
others, amused herself in drawing them out and foiling them against each
other, with a good deal of youthful tact, and want of charity, for a
while. She grew tired at last.

"They are long coming, uncle," she said, rising from her chair.

"They are here, Mary: putting up the model in the back lobby for the
last hour. Did you think it would be brought in here?"

"I don't know. Mr. Aikens is not here,"--glancing at the timepiece
uneasily.

"He's always slow," said one of the machinists, patting the dog's head.
"But I will rely more on his judgment of the engine than on my own.
He'll not risk a dollar on it, either, if there's a chance of its
proving a failure."

"It cannot be a failure," she said, impatiently, her peremptory brown
eyes lighting.

"It has been tried before," said her uncle, cautiously,--"or the same
basis of experiment,--substitution of compressed air for steam,--and it
did not succeed. But it is the man you reason from, Mary, not the
machine."

"I don't understand anything about the machine," in a lower voice,
addressing the man she knew to possess most influence in the party. "But
this Starke has given his life to it, and a life worth living, too. All
the strength of soul and body that God gave him has gone into that model
out yonder. He has been dragging it from place to place for years, half
starving, to get it a chance of trial"--

"All which says nothing for the wheels and pulleys