ubject to the bone,
without once relinquishing a point. An engineer by trade, Mackay
believed in the unlimited perfectibility of all machines except the
human machine. The latter he gave up with ridicule for a compound of
carrion and perverse gases. He had an appetite for disconnected facts
which I can only compare to the savage taste for beads. What is called
information was indeed a passion with the man, and he not only delighted
to receive it, but could pay you back in kind.

With all these capabilities, here was Mackay, already no longer young,
on his way to a new country, with no prospects, no money, and but little
hope. He was almost tedious in the cynical disclosures of his despair.
"The ship may go down for me," he would say, "now or to-morrow. I have
nothing to lose and nothing to hope." And again: "I am sick of the whole
damned performance." He was, like the kind little man already quoted,
another so-called victim of the bottle. But Mackay was miles from
publishing his weakness to the world; laid the blame of his failure on
corrupt masters and a corrupt State policy; and after he had been one
night overtaken and had played the buffoon in his cups, sternly, though
not without tact, suppressed all reference to his escapade. It was a
treat to see him manage this: the various jesters withered under his
gaze, and you were forced to recognise in him a certain steely force,
and a gift of command which might have ruled a senate.

In truth it was not whisky that had ruined him; he was ruined long
before for all good human purposes but conversation. His eyes were
sealed by a cheap, school-book materialism. He could see nothing in the
world but money and steam-engines. He did not know what you meant by the
word happiness. He had forgotten the simple emotions of childhood, and
perhaps never encountered the delights of youth. He believed in
production, that useful figment of economy, as if it had been real like
laughter; and production, without prejudice to liquor, was his god and
guide. One day he took me to task--a novel cry to me--upon the
over-payment of literature. Literary men, he said, were more highly paid
than artisans; yet the artisan made threshing machines and
butter-churns, and the man of letters, except in the way of a few useful
handbooks, made nothing worth the while. He produced a mere fancy
article. Mackay's notion of a book was "Hoppus's Measurer." Now in my
time I have possessed and even studied that w