very low place. Orders came that no one was to leave the works;
but the men inside (Knobsticks, as they are called) were precious
hungry and thought they would venture. Two of my companions and
myself went out with the very first, and had the full benefit of
every possible groan and bad language.' But the police cleared a
lane through the crowd, the pupils were suffered to escape unhurt,
and only the Knobsticks followed home and kicked with clogs; so
that Fleeming enjoyed, as we may say, for nothing, that fine thrill
of expectant valour with which he had sallied forth into the mob.
'I never before felt myself so decidedly somebody, instead of
nobody,' he wrote.

Outside as inside the works, he was 'pretty merry and well to do,'
zealous in study, welcome to many friends, unwearied in loving-
kindness to his mother. For some time he spent three nights a week
with Dr. Bell, 'working away at certain geometrical methods of
getting the Greek architectural proportions': a business after
Fleeming's heart, for he was never so pleased as when he could
marry his two devotions, art and science. This was besides, in all
likelihood, the beginning of that love and intimate appreciation of
things Greek, from the least to the greatest, from the AGAMEMMON
(perhaps his favourite tragedy) down to the details of Grecian
tailoring, which he used to express in his familiar phrase: 'The
Greeks were the boys.' Dr. Bell - the son of George Joseph, the
nephew of Sir Charles, and though he made less use of it than some,
a sharer in the distinguished talents of his race - had hit upon
the singular fact that certain geometrical intersections gave the
proportions of the Doric order. Fleeming, under Dr. Bell's
direction, applied the same method to the other orders, and again
found the proportions accurately given. Numbers of diagrams were