bring them to an early death; but sometimes a stone, which
ordinarily lasts six months, will burst and drive the grinder
through the roof. The blade-makers do their own forging and
hammering, and it is from first to last apparently all hand-work.
But it is head-work and heart-work too, and the men who wrought
at it wrought with such intensity and constancy that they did not
once look up or round where we paused to look on. I was made to
know that trade was dull and work slack, and these fellows were
lucky fellows to have anything to do. Still I did not envy them;
and I felt it a distinct relief to pass from their shops into the
cool, dim crypt which was filled with tusks of ivory, in all
sizes from those of the largest father elephant to those of the
babes of the herd; these were milk-tusks, I suppose. They get
dearer as the elephants get scarcer; and that must have been why
I paid as much for a penknife in the glittering showroom as it
would have cost me in New York, with the passage money and the
duties added. Because of the price, perhaps, I did not think of
buying the two-thousand-bladed penknife I saw there; but I could
never have used all the blades, now that we no longer make quill
pens. I looked fondly at the maker's name on the knife I did buy,
and said that the table cutlery of a certain small household
which set itself up forty years ago had borne the same: but the
pleasant salesman did not seem to feel the pathos of the fact so
much as I.


IV

There is not only a vast deal of industry in Sheffield, but there
is an unusual abundance of history, as there might very well be