l standards and weak in his discipline, for he allowed
several people I knew to flourish and be joyful who by good rights ought
to be smacked on their refractory pates; but now, it seems to me, I love
most of all to see my friends coming every day true to themselves:
Harriet illustrating herself, Horace himself. As for the old Captain, I
never wanted a hair of him changed. When men act in character, though
they be beggars or burglars, and do not pose or imitate, we have a kind
of fondness for them.

As I look back on it now I would not even make over Ed Smith. I did not
understand him as well then as I do now, but he was playing his part in
the world as well as ever he knew how to play it.

Sometimes I like to think of human beings as cells in the various parts
of the huge anatomy of society. In any such consideration Ed Smith would
be a stomach cell, and a pretty good one. Whenever the rest of us were
soaring too far aloft it was Ed's function to come stealing in upon us
like the honest odour of corned beef and cabbage. It was Ed's function
to see that we earned every week at least as much as we spent, a
tremendous undertaking when you come to think of it.

The fact is, whether we like it or not, we are all mixed up together in
this world--poets and plumbers, critics and cooks--and the more clearly
we recognize it, the firmer, sounder, truer, will be our grip upon the
significance of human life. Why, many a time, when I've been sitting
here reading in my study, living for the moment in the rarer atmosphere
of the poets, the philosophers, the prophets, I have had to get up and
go out and feed the pigs. I have always thought it, somehow, good for
me.

When Ed Smith arrived at the printing-office early on the following
morning, the fat, round stove, with legs broadly planted in a box of
sand, into which Fergus had poked accumulated scraps and cuttings of the
shop, had just broken into a jolly smile. Fergus himself, his early
morning temper scarcely less rumpled than his hair, was standing near
it, shoulders humped up, like a cold crow. He did not know that Ed Smith
had returned to Hempfield, but his face, when he saw him, betrayed not
the slightest sign of surprise.

Ed was evidently labouring under a considerable pressure of excitement.

"What's all this tomfoolery about printing the truth in the _Star_?" he
burst out.

Fergus began to rumble.

"Tired o' printin' lies, I s'pose," he observed.

Ed always wore h