"But--but--I thought it was a decoration. Why--why--why--it only means more work for _me_!"

"Exactly. You're to supply about sixty eight-candle lights when required.

But they won't be all in use at once----"

"Ah! I thought as much," said the Cat. "The reaction is bound to come."

"_And_" said the Waters, "you will do the ordinary work of the mill as well."

"Impossible!" the old Wheel quivered as it drove. "Aluric never did it-- nor Azor, nor Reinbert. Not even William de Warrenne or the Papal Legate.

There's no precedent for it. I tell you there's no precedent for working a wheel like this."

"Wait a while! We're making one as fast as we can. Aluric and Co. are dead. So's the Papal Legate. You've no notion how dead they are, but we're here--the Waters of Five Separate Systems. We're just as interesting as Domesday Book. Would you like to hear about the land-tenure in Trott's Wood? It's squat-right, chiefly." The mocking Waters leaped one over the other, chuckling and chattering profanely.

"In that hundred Jenkins, a tinker, with one dog--_unis canis_--holds, by the Grace of G.o.d and a habit he has of working hard, _unam hidam_--a large potato patch. Charmin' fellow, Jenkins. Friend of ours. Now, who the dooce did Jenkins keep? ... In the hundred of Callton is one charcoal-burner _irreligiosissimus h.o.m.o_--a bit of a rip--but a thorough sportsman. _Ibi est ecclesia. Non multum_. Not much of a church, _quia_ because, _episcopus_ the Vicar irritated the Nonconformists _tunc et post et modo_ --then and afterwards and now--until they built a cut-stone Congregational chapel with red brick facings that did not return itself--_defendebat se_ --at four thousand pounds."

"Charcoal-burners, vicars, schismatics, and red brick facings," groaned the Wheel. "But this is sheer blasphemy. What waters have they let in upon me?"

"Floods from the gutters. Faugh, this light is positively sickening!" said the Cat, rearranging her fur.

"We come down from the clouds or up from the springs, exactly like all other waters everywhere. Is that what's surprising you?" sang the Waters.

"Of course not. I know my work if you don't. What I complain of is your lack of reverence and repose. You've no instinct of deference towards your betters--your heartless parody of the Sacred volume (the Wheel meant Domesday Book)--proves it."

"Our betters?" said the Waters most solemnly. "What is there in all this dammed race that hasn't come down from the clouds, or----"

"Spare me that talk, please," the Wheel persisted. "You'd _never_ understand. It's the tone--your tone that we object to."

"Yes. It's your tone," said the Black Rat, picking himself up limb by limb.

"If you thought a trifle more about the work you're supposed to do, and a trifle less about your precious feelings, you'd render a little more duty in return for the power vested in you--we mean wasted on you," the Waters replied.

"I have been some hundreds of years laboriously acquiring the knowledge which you see fit to challenge so light-heartedly," the Wheel jarred.

"Challenge him! Challenge him!" clamoured the little waves riddling down through the tail-race. "As well now as later. Take him up!"

The main ma.s.s of the Waters plunging on the Wheel shocked that well-bolted structure almost into box-lids by saying: "Very good. Tell us what you suppose yourself to be doing at the present moment."

"Waiving the offensive form of your question, I answer, purely as a matter of courtesy, that I am engaged in the trituration of farinaceous substances whose ultimate destination it would be a breach of the trust reposed in me to reveal."

"Fiddle!" said the Waters. "We knew it all along! The first direct question shows his ignorance of his own job. Listen, old thing. Thanks to us, you are now actuating a machine of whose construction you know nothing, that that machine may, over wires of whose ramifications you are, by your very position, profoundly ignorant, deliver a power which you can never realise, to localities beyond the extreme limits of your mental horizon, with the object of producing phenomena which in your wildest dreams (if you ever dream) you could never comprehend. Is that clear, or would you like it all in words of four syllables?"

"Your a.s.sumptions are deliciously sweeping, but may I point out that a decent and--the dear old Abbot of Wilton would have put it in his resonant monkish Latin much better than I can--a scholarly reserve, does not necessarily connote blank vacuity of mind on all subjects."

"Ah, the dear old Abbot of Wilton," said the Rat sympathetically, as one nursed in that bosom. "Charmin' fellow--thorough scholar and gentleman.

Such a pity!"

"Oh, Sacred Fountains!" the Waters were fairly boiling. "He goes out of his way to expose his ignorance by triple bucketfuls. He creaks to high Heaven that he is hopelessly behind the common order of things! He invites the streams of Five Watersheds to witness his su-su-su-pernal incompetence, and then he talks as though there were untold reserves of knowledge behind him that he is too modest to bring forward. For a bland, circular, absolutely sincere impostor, you're a miracle, O Wheel!"

"I do not pretend to be anything more than an integral portion of an accepted and not altogether mushroom inst.i.tution."

"Quite so," said the Waters. "Then go round--hard----"

"To what end?" asked the Wheel.

"Till a big box of tanks in your house begins to fizz and fume--ga.s.sing is the proper word."

"It would be," said the Cat, sniffing.

"That will show that your acc.u.mulators are full. When the acc.u.mulators are exhausted, and the lights burn badly, you will find us whacking you round and round again."

"The end of life as decreed by Mangles and his creatures is to go whacking round and round for ever," said the Cat.

"In order," the Rat said, "that you may throw raw and unnecessary illumination upon all the unloveliness in the world. Unloveliness which we shall--er--have always with us. At the same time you will riotously neglect the so-called little but vital graces that make up Life."

"Yes, Life," said the Cat, "with its dim delicious half-tones and veiled indeterminate distances. Its surprisals, escapes, encounters, and dizzying leaps--its full-throated choruses in honour of the morning star, and its melting reveries beneath the sun-warmed wall."

"Oh, you can go on the tiles, Pussalina, just the same as usual," said the laughing Waters. "_We_ sha'n't interfere with you."

"On the tiles, forsooth!" hissed the Cat.

"Well, that's what it amounts to," persisted the Waters. "We see a good deal of the minor graces of life on our way down to our job."

"And--but I fear I speak to deaf ears--do they never impress you?" said the Wheel.

"Enormously," said the Waters. "We have already learned six refined synonyms for loafing."

"But (here again I feel as though preaching in the wilderness) it never occurs to you that there may exist some small difference between the wholly animal--ah--rumination of bovine minds and the discerning, well- apportioned leisure of the finer type of intellect?"

"Oh, yes. The bovine mind goes to sleep under a hedge and makes no bones about it when it's shouted at. We've seen _that_--in haying-time--all along the meadows. The finer type is wide awake enough to fudge up excuses for shirking, and mean enough to get stuffy when its excuses aren't accepted. Turn over!"

"But, my good people, no gentleman gets stuffy as you call it. A certain proper pride, to put it no higher, forbids---"

"Nothing that he wants to do if he really wants to do it. Get along! What are you giving us? D'you suppose we've scoured half heaven in the clouds, and half earth in the mists, to be taken in at this time of the day by a bone-idle, old hand-quern of your type?"

"It is not for me to bandy personalities with you. I can only say that I simply decline to accept the situation."

"Decline away. It doesn't make any odds. They'll probably put in a turbine if you decline too much."

"What's a turbine?" said the Wheel, quickly.

"A little thing you don't see, that performs surprising revolutions. But you won't decline. You'll hang on to your two nice red-strapped axles and your new machine-moulded pinions like--a--like a leech on a lily stem!

There's centuries of work in your old bones if you'd only apply yourself to it; and, mechanically, an overshot wheel with this head of water is about as efficient as a turbine."

"So in future I am to be considered mechanically? I have been painted by at least five Royal Academicians."

"Oh, you can be painted by five hundred when you aren't at work, of course. But while you are at work you'll work. You won't half-stop and think and talk about rare plants and d.i.c.ky-birds and farinaceous fiduciary interests. You'll continue to revolve, and this new head of water will see that you do so continue."

"It is a matter on which it would be exceedingly ill-advised to form a hasty or a premature conclusion. I will give it my most careful consideration," said the Wheel.