fragment had been mastered. For the hundredth
time the great motor was a success!

And yet, had this very pin or crank or cog, on
which he had set such store, refused the next hour
or day or week to do its work, no trace of his
disappointment would have been found in his face or
speech. His faith was always supreme; his belief
in his ideals unshaken. If the pin or crank would
not answer, the lever or pulley would. It was the
"adjustment" that was at fault, not the principle.
And so the dear old man would work on, week after
week, only to abandon his results again, and with
equal cheerfulness and enthusiasm to begin upon another
appliance totally unlike any other he had tried
before. "It was only a mile-stone," he would say;
"every one that I pass brings me so much nearer the
end."

If you had been only a stranger--some savant,
for instance, who wanted a problem in mechanics
solved, or a professor, blinded by the dazzling light of
the almost daily discoveries of the time, in search of
mental ammunition to fire back at curious students
daily bombarding you with puzzling questions; or
had you been a thrifty capitalist, holding back a first
payment until an expert like Richard Horn had
passed upon the merits of some new labor-saving device
of the day; had you been any one of these, and
you might very easily have been, for such persons