father?" very gravely.

"That's right," the old man would exclaim, listening with delight to the
rolling _r_s. "Always sound your _r_s whatever you do. I'll not own you
if you come home sayin,'_Ah yoh thah?_' when you mean '_Are you there?_'
Do you mind me, now?"

"Yes, father."

"Well, be heedin' me, then! Now, how are you on the _h_s. Are you as
steady on them as you were when you were home before?"

Then Henry would protest. "But, father," he would say, "they don't all
drop their _h_s. It's only the common ones that drop them!...

"They're all common, Henry ... the whole lot, common as dirt!" Mr. Quinn
retorted once to that, and then began to tell his son how the English
people had lost the habits and instincts of gentlemen in the eighteenth
century ... "where Ireland still is, my son!" ... and had become
money-grubbers. "The English," he said, lying back in his chair and
delivering his sentences as if he were a monarch pronouncing decrees,
"ceased to be gentlemen on the day that Hargreaves invented the
spinnin'-jenny, and landlords gave way to mill-owners." He stopped for a
second or two and then continued as if an idea had only just come into
his head. "An' it was proper punishment for Hargreaves," he said, "that
the English let him die in the workhouse. Proper punishment. What the
hell did he want to invent the thing for?..."

Henry looked up, startled by the sudden anger that swept over his
father, replacing the oracular banter with which he had begun his
discourse on the decadence of manners in England.

"But, father," he said, "you aren't against machinery, are you?"

"Yes, I am," Mr. Quinn replied, banging the arm of his chair with his
fist. "I'd smash every machine in the world, if I were in authority."

"That's absurd, father. I mean, what would become of progress?"

Mr. Quinn leaped out of his chair and strode up and down the room.
"Progress! Progress!" he exclaimed. "D'ye think machines are progress?
D'ye think a factory is progress? Some of you young chaps think you're
makin' progress when you're only makin' changes. I tell you, Henry, the
only thing that is capable of progression is the human soul, and
machines can't develop _that_!" He came back to his seat as he said this
and sat down, but he did not lie back as he had done before. He sat
forward, gazing intently at his son, and spoke with a curious passion
such as Henry had never heard him use before. "Look here, Henry!" he
said, "there was