was bright and wicked. "Got to be meathured every blethed day—every blethed 'en, 'e thayth. Tho' ath to thee they grow properly. What oh. . .eh? Every blethed 'en—every blethed day."
And Mr. Skinner put up his hand to laugh behind it in a refined and contagious manner, and humped his shoulders very much—and only the other eye of him failed to participate in his laughter. Then doubting if the carpenter had quite got the point of it, he repeated in a penetrating whisper: "Meathured!"
"'E's worse than our old guvnor; I'm dratted if 'e ain't," said the carpenter from Hickleybrow.
II
Experimental work is the most tedious thing in the world (unless it be the reports of it in the Philosophical Transactions), and it seemed a long time to Mr. Bensington before his first dream of enormous possibilities was replaced by a crumb of realisation. He had taken the Experimental Farm in October, and it was May before the first inklings of success began. Herakleophorbia I. and II. and III. had to be tried, and failed; there was trouble with the rats of the Experimental Farm, and there was trouble with the Skinners. The only way to get Skinner to do anything he was told to do was to dismiss him. Then he would rub his unshaven chin—he was always unshaven most miraculously and yet never bearded—with a flattened hand, and look at Mr. Bensington with one eye and over him with the other, and say, "Oo, of courthe, Thir—if you're theriouth. . .!"
But at last success dawned. And its herald was a
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