was unmistakable; it indicated an instinctive,
involuntary protest. But he recovered himself in a flash. 'That's
jealousy,' he laughed. 'All you British Museum people are the same.'
Then he added, with an unsuccessful attempt to convince me that he
meant what he was saying: 'Of course it is small. It's nothing, simply
nothing.'

Yes, I had unwittingly found the joint in the armour of this
extraordinary Midland personage. With all his irony, with all his
violent humour, with all his just and unprejudiced perceptions, he had
a tenderness for the Institution of which he was the dictator. He loved
it. He could laugh like a god at everything in the Five Towns except
this one thing. He would try to force himself to regard even this with
the same lofty detachment, but he could not do it naturally.

I stopped at a case of Wedgwood ware, marked 'Perkins Collection.'

'By Jove!' I exclaimed, pointing to a vase. 'What a body!'

He was enchanted by my enthusiasm.

'Funny you should have hit on that,' said he. 'Old Daddy Perkins always
called it his ewe-lamb.'

Thus spoken, the name of the greatest authority on Wedgwood ware that
Europe has ever known curiously impressed me.

'I suppose you knew him?' I questioned.

'Considering that I was one of the pall-bearers at his funeral, and
caught the champion cold of my life!'

'What sort of a man was he?'

'Outside Wedgwood ware he wasn't any sort of a man. He was that scourge
of society, a philanthropist,' said Mr Brindley. 'He was an upright
citizen, and two thousand people followed him to his grave. I'm an
upright citizen, but I have no hope that two thousand people will
follow me to my grave.'

'You never know what may happen,' I observed, smiling.

'No.' He shook his head. 'If you undermine the moral character of your
fellow-citizens by a long course of unbridled miscellaneous
philanthropy, you can have a funeral procession as long as you like, at
the rate of about forty shillings a foot. But you'll never touch the
great heart of the enlightened public of these boroughs in any other
way. Do you imagine anyone cared a twopenny damn for Perkins's Wedgwood
ware?'

'It's like that everywhere,' I said.

'I suppose it is,' he assented unwillingly.

Who can tell what was passing in the breast of Mr Brindley? I could
not. At least I could not tell with any precision. I could only gather,
vaguely, that what he considered the wrong-headedness, the blindness,
the lack of tru