his head was bent over his task only the crown of a red and matured
cricketing cap, which nodded in time to his hammer, was presented to
you. When he paused to speak, and glanced up, he showed a face that
the gas jet, with the aid of many secluded years, had tinctured with
its own artificial hue, a face puckered through a long frowning intent
on old boots. He wore an apron that had ragged gaps in it. He was a
frail and dingy little man, and might never have had a mother, but
could have been born of that dusty workroom, to which he had been a
faithful son all his life. It was a murky interior shut in from the
day, a litter of petty tools and nameless rubbish on a ruinous bench, a
disorder of dilapidated boots, that mean gas jet, a smell of leather;
and there old Pascoe's hammer defiantly and rapidly attacked its
circumstances, driving home at times, and all unseen, more than those
rivets. If he rose to rake over his bench for material or a tool, he
went spryly, aided by a stick, but at every step his body heeled over
because one leg was shorter than the other. Having found what he
wanted he would wheel round, with a strange agility that was apparently
a consequence of his deformity, continuing his discourse, and driving
his points into the air with his hammer, and so hobble back, still
talking; still talking through his funny cap, as his neighbours used to
say of him. At times he convoluted aerial designs and free ideas with
his hammer, spending it aloft on matters superior to boots. The boots
were never noticed. Pascoe could revivify his dust. The glitter of
his spectacles when he looked up might have been the sparkling of an
ardent vitality suppressed in his little body.

The wall space of his room was stratified with shelves, where half-seen
bottles and nondescript lumps were to be guessed at, like fossils
embedded in shadow. They had never been moved, and they never would
be. Hanging from a nail on one shelf was a framed lithograph of the