of good wages and a choice of berths; he is desired like a good domestic servant.  Eli Machin was the prince of engine-men.  His engine never went wrong, his coal bills were never extravagant, and (supreme virtue!) he was never absent on Mondays.  From his post in the slip-house he watched over the whole works like a father, stern, gruff, forbidding, but to be trusted absolutely.  He was sixty years old, and had been ‘putting by’ for nearly half a century.  He lived in a tiny villa-cottage with his bed-ridden, cheerful wife, and lent small sums on mortgage of approved freeholds at 5 per cent.—­no more and no less.  Secure behind this rampart of saved money, he was the equal of the King on the throne.  Not a magnate in all the Five Towns who would dare to be condescending to Eli Machin.  He had been a sidesman at the old church.  A trades-union had once asked him to become a working-man candidate for the Bursley Town Council, but he had refused because he did not care for the possibility of losing caste by being concerned in a strike.  His personal respectability was entirely unsullied, and he worshipped this abstract quality as he worshipped God.

There was only one blot—­but how foul!—­on Eli Machin’s career, and that had been dropped by his daughter Miriam, when, defying his authority, she married a scene-shifter at Hanbridge Theatre.  The atrocious idea of being connected with the theatre had rendered him speechless for a time.  He could but endure it in the most awful silence that ever hid passionate feeling.  Then one day he had burst out, ’The wench is no better than a tiddy-fol-lol!’ Only this solitary phrase—­nothing else.

What a tiddy-fol-lol was no one quite knew; but the word, getting about, stuck to him, and for some weeks boys used to shout it after him in the streets, until he caught one of them, and in thirty seconds put an end to the practice.  Thenceforth Miriam, with all hers, was dead to him.  When her husband expired of consumption, Eli Machin saw the avenging arm of the Lord in action; and when her boy grew to be a source of painful anxiety to her, he said to himself that the wrath of Heaven was not yet cooled towards this impious daughter.  The passage of fifteen years had apparently in no way softened his resentment.

The challenged lad in Mynors’ yard slowly approached the slip-house door, and halted before Eli Machin, grinning.

‘Well, young un,’ the old man said absently, ‘what dost want?’

‘Tiddy-fol-lol, grandfeyther,’ the child drawled in his silly, irritating voice, and added:  ‘They said I darena say it to ye.’

Without and instant’s hesitation Eli Machin raised his still powerful arm, and, catching the boy under the ear, knocked him down.  The other boys yelled with unaffected pleasure and ran away.

‘Get up, and be off wi’ ye.  Ye dunna belong to this bank,’ said Eli Machin in cold anger to the lad.  But the lad did not stir; the lad’s eyes were closed, and he lay white on the stones.