 same position - than all the
others, I was going to say.«
    »I don't know that I should find that a consolation, if it were my case; but
I am very glad that you do.«
    »Understand me! I don't say,« he replied in his steady, planning way, and
looking into the distance before him as if his grey eye were measuring it, »that
it's recompense for a man's toil and hope; but it's a certain sort of relief to
know that I might have counted on this.«
    He spoke in that quiet deliberate manner, and in that undertone, which is
often observable in mechanics who consider and adjust with great nicety. It
belonged to him like his suppleness of thumb, or his peculiar way of tilting up
his hat at the back every now and then, as if he were contemplating some
half-finished work of his hand, and thinking about it.
    »Disappointed?« he went on, as he walked between them under the trees. »Yes.
No doubt I am disappointed. Hurt? Yes. No doubt I am hurt. That's only natural.
But what I mean, when I say that people who put themselves in the same position,
are mostly used in the same way -«
    »In England,« said Mr. Meagles.
    »Oh! of course I mean in England. When they take their inventions into
foreign countries, that's quite different. And that's the reason why so many go
there.«
    Mr. Meagles very hot indeed again.
    »What I mean is, that however this comes to be the regular way of our
government, it is its regular way. Have you ever heard of any projector or
inventor who failed to find it all but inaccessible, and whom it did not
discourage and ill-treat?«
    »I cannot say that I ever have.«
    »Have you ever known it to be beforehand in the adoption of any useful
thing? Ever known it to set an example of any useful kind?«
    »I am a good deal older than my friend here,« said Mr. Meagles, »and I'll
answer that. Never.«
    »But we all three have known, I expect,« said the inventor, »a pretty many
cases of its fixed determination to be miles upon miles, and years upon years,
behind the rest of us; and of its being found out persisting in the use of
things long superseded, even after the better things
