“Wherever my son is happy and safe from harm, there I wish to stay—­of course.”

Next morning Henry called on Dr. Amboyne, and found him in his study, teaching what looked a boy of sixteen, but was twenty-two, to read monosyllables.  On Little’s entrance the pupil retired front his uphill work, and glowered with vacillating eyes.  The lad had a fair feminine face, with three ill things in it:  a want, a wildness, and a weakness.  To be sure Henry saw it at a disadvantage:  for vivid intelligence would come now and then across this mild, wild, vacant face, like the breeze that sweeps a farm-yard pond.

“Good-morning, Little.  This is your fellow-workman.”

“He does not look up to much,” said Henry, with all a workman’s bluntness.

“What, you have found him out!  Never mind; he can beat the town at one or two things, and it is for these we will use him.  Some call him an idiot.  The expression is neat and vigorous, but not precise; so I have christened him the Anomaly.  Anomaly, this is Mr. Little; go and shake hands with him, and admire him.”

The Anomaly went directly, and gazed into Little’s face for some time.

He then made his report.  “He is beautiful and black.”

“I’ve seen him blacker.  Now leave off admiring him, and look at these pictures while I prose.  Two thousand philosophers are writing us dead with ‘Labor and Capital.’  But I vary the bore.  ’Life, Labor, and Capital,’ is my chant:  and, whereas Life has hitherto been banished from the discussion, I put Life in its true place, at the head of the trio.  (And Life I divide into long Life, and happy Life.) The subject is too vast to be dealt with all at once; but I’ll give you a peep of it.  The rustic laborer in the South sells his labor for too little money to support life comfortably.  That is a foul wrong.  The rustic laborer in the North has small wages, compared with a pitman, or a cutler; but he has enough for health, and he lives longer and more happily than either the pitman or the cutler; so that account is square, in my view of things.  But now dive into the Hillsborough trades, and you will find this just balance of Life, Labor, and Capital regarded in some, but defied in others:  a forger is paid as much or more than a dry-grinder, though forging is a hard but tolerably healthy trade, and dry-grinding means an early death after fifteen years of disease and misery.  The file-cutters are even more killed and less paid.  What is to be done then?  Raise the wages of the more homicidal trades!  But this could only be done by all the Unions acting in concert.  Now the rival philosophers, who direct the Unions, are all against Democritus—­that’s myself; they set no value on life.  And indeed the most intelligent one, Grotait, smiles blandly on Death, and would grind his scythe for him—­at the statement price—­because that scythe thins the labor market, and so helps keep up prices.”