"You are proud, Mr. Beck? The only Pride should be the pride of work. Beautiful the meanest thing that works; even the rusty and unmusical Meatjack. All else belongs to the outlook of him whom men call Beelzebub. The brief Day passes with its poor paper crowns in tinsel gilt; Night is at hand with her silences and her veracities. What hast thou done? All the rest is phantasmal. Work only remains. Say, brother, what is thy work?"
"I have struck Ile," replied Gilead proudly, feeling that his Work (with a capital W) had been well and thoroughly done.
The Philosopher stepped aside.
Jack Dunquerque brought up the next.
"Mr. Beck, Alfred Tennyson, the Poet Laureate."
This time it was a man with robust frame and strongly-marked features. He wore a long black beard, streaked with grey and rather ragged, with a ragged mass of black hair, looking as he did at Oxford when they made him an honorary D.C.L., and an undergraduate from the gallery asked him politely, "Did they wake and call you early?"
"Mr. Tennyson," said Mr. Beck, "I do assure you, sir, that this is the kindest thing that has been done to me since I came to England. I hope I see you well, sir. I read your Fifine at the Fair, sir—no, that was the other man's—I mean, sir, your Songs before Sunrise; and I congratulate you. We've got some poets on our side of the water, sir. I've written poetry myself for the papers. We've got Longfellow and Lowell, and take out you and Mr. Swinburne, with them we'll meet your lot."
Mr. Tennyson opened his mouth to speak, but shut it again in silence, and looking at Jack mournfully as if he had forgotten something, he stepped aside.
Jack presented another.
"Mr. John Ruskin."