s on and says he's never told anything."

"All right," said Paul. But he would almost rather have forfeited the
prize than have to tell his father.

"I've won a prize in a competition, dad," he said. Morel turned round to
him.

"Have you, my boy? What sort of a competition?"

"Oh, nothing--about famous women."

"And how much is the prize, then, as you've got?"

"It's a book."

"Oh, indeed!"

"About birds."

"Hm--hm!"

And that was all. Conversation was impossible between the father and any
other member of the family. He was an outsider. He had denied the God in
him.

The only times when he entered again into the life of his own people
was when he worked, and was happy at work. Sometimes, in the evening, he
cobbled the boots or mended the kettle or his pit-bottle. Then he always
wanted several attendants, and the children enjoyed it. They united with
him in the work, in the actual doing of something, when he was his real
self again.

He was a good workman, dexterous, and one who, when he was in a good
humour, always sang. He had whole periods, months, almost years, of
friction and nasty temper. Then sometimes he was jolly again. It was
nice to see him run with a piece of red-hot iron into the scullery,
crying:

"Out of my road--out of my road!"

Then he hammered the soft, red-glowing stuff on his iron goose, and made
the shape he wanted. Or he sat absorbed for a moment, soldering. Then
the children watched with joy as the metal sank suddenly molten, and was
shoved about against the nose of the soldering-iron, while the room was
full of a scent of burnt resin and hot tin, and Morel was silent and
intent for a minute. He always sang when he mended boots because of the
jolly sound of hammering. And he was rather happy when he sat putting
great patches on his moleskin pit trousers, which he would often do,
considering them too dirty, and the stuff too hard, for his wife to
mend.

But the best time for the young children was when he made fuses. Morel
fetched a sheaf of long sound wheat-straws from the attic. These he
cleaned with his hand, till each one gleamed like a stalk of gold, after
which he cut the straws into lengths of about six inches, leaving, if he
could, a notch at the bottom of each piece. He always had a beautifully
sharp knife that could cut a straw clean without hurting it. Then he set
in the middle of the table a heap of gunpowder, a little pile of black
grains upon the white-scrubbed b