On the Sunday Henry dined with him and his party, at “Savage’s Hotel,” and the said dinner rather surprised Henry; the meats were simple, but of good quality, and the wines, which were all brought out by Grotait, were excellent.  That Old Saw, who retailed ale and spirits to his customers, would serve nothing less to his guests than champagne and burgundy.  And, if the cheer was generous, the host was admirable; he showed, at the head of his genial board, those qualities which, coupled with his fanaticism, had made him the Doge of the Hillsborough trades.  He was primed on every subject that could interest his guests, and knew something about nearly everything else.  He kept the ball always going, but did not monologuize, except when he was appealed to as a judge, and then did it with a mellow grace that no man can learn without Nature’s aid.  There is no society, however distinguished, in which Grotait would not have been accepted as a polished and admirable converser.

Add to this that he had an art, which was never quite common, but is now becoming rare, of making his guests feel his friends—­for the time, at all events.

Young Little sat amazed, and drank in his words with delight, and could not realize that this genial philosopher was the person who had launched a band of ruffians at him.  Yet, in his secret heart, he could not doubt it:  and so he looked and listened with a marvelous mixture of feelings, on which one could easily write pages of analysis, very curious, and equally tedious.

They dined at three; and, at five, they got up, as agreed beforehand, and went to inspect the reservoir in course of construction.  A more compendious work of art was never projected:  the contractors had taken for their basis a mountain gorge, with a stream flowing through it down toward Hillsborough; all they had to do was to throw an embankment across the lower end of the gorge, and turn it to a mighty basin open to receive the stream, and the drainage from four thousand acres of hill.  From this lake a sixty-foot wear was to deal out the water-supply to the mill-owners below, and the surplus to the people of Hillsborough, distant about eight miles on an easy decline.

Now, as the reservoir must be full at starting, and would then be eighty feet deep in the center, and a mile long, and a quarter of a mile broad, on the average, an embankment of uncommon strength was required to restrain so great a mass of water; and this was what the Hillsborough worthies were curious about.  They strolled out to the works, and then tea was to come out after them, the weather being warm and soft.  Close to the works they found a foreman of engineers smoking his pipe, and interrogated him.  He showed them a rising wall, five hundred feet wide at the base, and told them it was to be ninety feet high, narrowing, gradually, to a summit twelve feet broad.  As the whole embankment was to be twelve hundred feet long at the top, this gave some idea of the bulk of the materials to be used:  those materials were clay, shale, mill-stone, and sandstone of looser texture.  The engineer knew Grotait, and brought him a drawing of the mighty cone to be erected.  “Why, it will be a mountain!” said Little.