“The human body?”
“The machine that invents and executes machines, the human body,—the most delicate mechanism of all, the type of all its own inventions. Padiham achieves magical cures. He is working by practice, and lately by study, into profound surgical skill. There is no man in England whom I would trust to mend me if I broke, as I would Padiham.”
“He avenges himself upon Nature for not perfecting him, by restoring her breakages. Why do you not suggest to him to become a professed repairer of mankind?”
“I have suggested it. He says he must take his own way. Besides, mechanics can hardly spare him. Many of my own inventions would have stayed in embryo in my brain, if Padiham had not played Vulcan, and split a passage for them. I talk over my schemes to him; he catches the idea and puts it into form at once.”
“You interest me very much,” said I. “I must see the man and know him, for my own sake as well as for Short’s Cut-off.”
“Take care he does not drive you away in a huff. You’ll find him a rough-hewn bit.”
I went at once. A man who had warred with Pikes at the Foolonner Mine, to say nothing of other ruder characters, was not to be baffled, so he trusted, by a surly genius.
As I walked through the crush of the streets, again there came to me that vision of the old man and his daughter lost in the press,—more sadly lost, more vainly seeking refuge here, than in the desert solitudes where we had found them.
Every one familiar with great cities knows of strange rencounters there, and at every turn I looked narrowly about, fancying that I should see the forms I sought, just vanishing, but leaving me a clew of pursuit. This expectation grew so intense, that I exaggerated slight resemblances of costume or of port, and often found myself excitedly hurrying quite out of my way, and shouldering through huddles of people, to come at some figure in the distance. But when I overtook the old man of feeble step, or the young woman moving fearlessly amid the pitiless crowd, or the pair I had followed, and stared at them eagerly, strange and offended looks met me instead of the familiar, perhaps the welcome, look I had hoped; and I turned away forlornly exaggerating the disappointment as I had the fancy.
I cooled at last from this flurry. Nothing but blanks in the lottery. It was folly to be wasting my energy in this way. Trusting Providence, or rather this semblance of Providence, this mere chance, was thin basis for action. So I resumed my proper course, and turned my steps quietly toward Padiham’s shop.