"Eh, how you talk, lad! Why, you'll get wed an' have chilther of your own. You're young enough, an' well off beside."
"There's no need for me to get wed, mother, so long as th' old woman lasts, an' who'll last a long while yet, I reckon. There's none o' these young ladies as is kerfle enough to do for a man like me as has been accustomed to see his house well managed. Why, they cannot neither make a shirt nor a puddin'."
These disparaging remarks concerning the "Girl of the Period" filled (as they were designed to fill) Mrs. Ogden's mind with tranquillity and satisfaction. To complete her good-humor, Jacob unrolled the plans and elevation of his new mill. The plans were most extensive, but the elevation did not strike the spectator by its height; for as the site was not costly, Jacob Ogden had adopted a system then becoming prevalent in the smaller towns of the manufacturing districts, where land was comparatively cheap—the system of erecting mills rather as sheds than on the old five-storied model. His new mill was simply a field walled in and roofed over, with a tall engine house and an enormous chimney at one end. People of æsthetic tastes would see nothing lovely in the long straight lines of roofs and rows of monotonously identical windows which displayed themselves on the designs drawn by Ogden's architect; but to Ogden's eyes there was a beauty here greater than that of the finest cathedral he had ever beheld. He was not an imaginative person; but he had quite enough imagination to realize the vista of the vast interior, the roar of the innumerable wheels, the incessant activity of the living makers of his wealth. He saw himself standing in the noble engine-room, and watching the unhurried see-saw of the colossal beams; the rise and fall of the pistons, thicker than the spear of Goliath, and brighter than columns of silver; the revolution of the enormous fly-wheel; the exquisite truth of motion; the steadiness of man's great creature, that never knows fatigue. That engine-room should be the finest in all Shayton. It should have a plaster cornice round its ceiling, and a great moulded ornament in the middle of it; the gas-lights should be in handsome ground-glass globes; and about the casings of the cylinders there should be a luxury of mahogany and brass.
"But, Jacob," said his mother, when she had duly adjusted her spectacles, and gradually mastered the main features of the plan, "it seems to me as you've put th' mill all o' one side, and th' engine nobbut half-fills th' engine-house."
Ogden had never heard of Taymouth Castle and the old Earl of Breadalbane, who, when somebody asked him why he built his house at the extremity of his estate, instead of in the middle of it, answered that he intended to "brizz yint."[15] But, like the ambitious Earl, Ogden was one of those who "brizz yint."
"Why, mother," he said, "this 'ere's nobbut half the new mill. What can you do with forty-five thousand?"