I stopped at a case of Wedgwood ware, marked ‘Perkins Collection.’

‘By Jove!’ I exclaimed, pointing to a vase.  ‘What a body!’

He was enchanted by my enthusiasm.

‘Funny you should have hit on that,’ said he.  ’Old Daddy Perkins always called it his ewe-lamb.’

Thus spoken, the name of the greatest authority on Wedgwood ware that Europe has ever known curiously impressed me.

‘I suppose you knew him?’ I questioned.

’Considering that I was one of the pall-bearers at his funeral, and caught the champion cold of my life!’

‘What sort of a man was he?’

’Outside Wedgwood ware he wasn’t any sort of a man.  He was that scourge of society, a philanthropist,’ said Mr Brindley.  ’He was an upright citizen, and two thousand people followed him to his grave.  I’m an upright citizen, but I have no hope that two thousand people will follow me to my grave.’

‘You never know what may happen,’ I observed, smiling.

‘No.’  He shook his head.  ’If you undermine the moral character of your fellow-citizens by a long course of unbridled miscellaneous philanthropy, you can have a funeral procession as long as you like, at the rate of about forty shillings a foot.  But you’ll never touch the great heart of the enlightened public of these boroughs in any other way.  Do you imagine anyone cared a twopenny damn for Perkins’s Wedgwood ware?’

‘It’s like that everywhere,’ I said.

‘I suppose it is,’ he assented unwillingly.

Who can tell what was passing in the breast of Mr Brindley?  I could not.  At least I could not tell with any precision.  I could only gather, vaguely, that what he considered the wrong-headedness, the blindness, the lack of true perception, of his public was beginning to produce in his individuality a faint trace of permanent soreness.  I regretted it.  And I showed my sympathy with him by asking questions about the design and construction of the museum (a late addition to the Institution), of which I happened to know that he had been the architect.

He at once became interested and interesting.  Although he perhaps insisted a little too much on the difficulties which occur when original talent encounters stupidity, he did, as he walked me up and down, contrive to convey to me a notion of the creative processes of the architect in a way that was in my experience entirely novel.  He was impressing me anew, and I was wondering whether he was unique of his kind or whether there existed regiments of him in this strange parcel of England.

‘Now, you see this girder,’ he said, looking upwards.

That’s surely something of Fuge’s, isn’t it?’ I asked, indicating a small picture in a corner, after he had finished his explanation of the functions of the girder.