ceived a telegram from Marseilles, waited for her train
at Victoria. In order to insure being in time he had arrived a couple of
hours too soon, and patiently wandered about the station. Now and then he
stopped before the engines of trains at rest, fascinated, as he always
was, by perfect mechanism. A driver, dismounting from the cab, and seeing
him lost in admiration of the engine, passed him a civil word, to which
Septimus, always courteous, replied. They talked further.

"I see you're an engineer, sir," said the driver, who found himself in
conversation with an appreciative expert.

"My father was," said Septimus. "But I could never get up in time for my
examinations. Examinations seem so silly. Why should you tell a set of men
what they know already?"

The grimy driver expressed the opinion that examinations were necessary. He
who spoke had passed them.

"I suppose you can get up at any time," Septimus remarked enviously.
"Somebody ought to invent a machine for those who can't."

"You only want an alarm-clock," said the driver.

Septimus shook his head. "They're no good. I tried one once, but it made
such a dreadful noise that I threw a boot at it."

"Did that stop it?"

"No," murmured Septimus. "The boot hit another clock on the mantelpiece, a
Louis Quinze clock, and spoiled it. I did get up, but I found the method
too expensive, so I never tried it again."

The engine of an outgoing train blew off steam, and the resounding din
deafened the station. Septimus held his hands to his ears. The driver
grinned.

"I can't stand that noise," Septimus explained when it was over. "Once I
tried to work out an invention for modifying it. It was a kind of
combination between a gramaphone and an orchestrion. You stuck it inside
somewhere, and instead of the awful screech a piece of music would come
out of the funnel. In fact, it might have gone on playing all the time the
train was in motion. It would have been so cheery for the drivers, wouldn't
it?"

The unimaginative mechanic whose wits were scattered by this fantastic
proposition used his bit of cotton waste as a handkerchief, and remarked
with vague politeness that it was a pity the gentleman was not an engineer.
But Septimus deprecated the compliment. He looked wistfully up at the
girders of the glass roof and spoke in his gentle, tired voice.

"You see," he concluded, "if I had been in practice as an engineer I should
never have designed machinery in the ort