He had seen all the theaters, all the stock places were as familiar to him as the alphabet, and as for the dissipations he had so tired of them that he was a saint. He was virtuous from necessity.
One morning I asked him to go with me to inspect a machine shop which was one of the lions of the place. For sheer want of something else to do, he put on his coat and went. I was very much interested in some of the processes which were new to me, but my friend yawned through the whole of it, in the same ennuied way that was manifest since I knew him. Finally we came before a machine known in machinery as a shaper. It was a powerful tool, which went backward and forward, cutting at each forward movement a thin thread of iron. The work it was doing was cutting a slot in a shaft of iron. The shaft, before it went into the shaper, was a round piece of iron. Delancy looked at it with the first expression of interest I had ever seen in his face.
The man at the machine had nothing to do after the shaft was put into the “chucks” but to sit and read a novel, the machine doing all the work with regularity and accuracy.
“Do you forge this shaft originally?” he asked the man.
“Certainly, sir.”
“How long does it take you to cut this slot in it?”
“About four hours.”
“Then why don’t you have the piece of iron forged with this slot made down to within say a quarter-inch and save nine-tenths of this time?”
“We never did it that way,” was the reply of the man; “it won’t do.”
“But it will do,” said Delancy. “That shaft can be forged, to begin with, something as it should come out, and it’s a cussed waste of time to do it in this way.”