“I have been some hundreds of years laboriously acquiring the knowledge which you see fit to challenge so light-heartedly,” the Wheel jarred.
“Challenge him! Challenge him!” clamoured the little waves riddling down through the tail-race. “As well now as later. Take him up!”
The main mass of the Waters plunging on the Wheel shocked that well-bolted structure almost into box-lids by saying: “Very good. Tell us what you suppose yourself to be doing at the present moment.”
“Waiving the offensive form of your question, I answer, purely as a matter of courtesy, that I am engaged in the trituration of farinaceous substances whose ultimate destination it would be a breach of the trust reposed in me to reveal.”
“Fiddle!” said the Waters. “We knew it all along! The first direct question shows his ignorance of his own job. Listen, old thing. Thanks to us, you are now actuating a machine of whose construction you know nothing, that that machine may, over wires of whose ramifications you are, by your very position, profoundly ignorant, deliver a power which you can never realise, to localities beyond the extreme limits of your mental horizon, with the object of producing phenomena which in your wildest dreams (if you ever dream) you could never comprehend. Is that clear, or would you like it all in words of four syllables?”
“Your assumptions are deliciously sweeping, but may I point out that a decent and—the dear old Abbot of Wilton would have put it in his resonant monkish Latin much better than I can—a scholarly reserve, does not necessarily connote blank vacuity of mind on all subjects.”
“Ah, the dear old Abbot of Wilton,” said the Rat sympathetically, as one nursed in that bosom. “Charmin’ fellow—thorough scholar and gentleman. Such a pity!”
“Oh, Sacred Fountains!” the Waters were fairly boiling. “He goes out of his way to expose his ignorance by triple bucketfuls. He creaks to high Heaven that he is hopelessly behind the common order of things! He invites the streams of Five Watersheds to witness his su-su-su-pernal incompetence, and then he talks as though there were untold reserves of knowledge behind him that he is too modest to bring forward. For a bland, circular, absolutely sincere impostor, you’re a miracle, O Wheel!”
“I do not pretend to be anything more than an integral portion of an accepted and not altogether mushroom institution.”
“Quite so,” said the Waters. “Then go round—hard——”