"I can't understand it--a man happy doing nothing. I suppose I am a sort of machine--I must have work fed into me. Here I am at fifty-five and not a wheel moving. It was the power of the mills that kept me running. Now I have lost that." For a moment he was silent. Then he leaned toward me and said in a wistful voice: "David, you remember my brother. He could be happy just sitting thinking. Now if my energy could have been combined with his mentality, what----" I finished the sentence. From the past came the picture of the Professor at the bare table in the cabin, pointing a long finger at me. "What a man we would have made." Rufus Blight's eyes opened wide. "How did you read my thoughts so well!" he exclaimed. "The conclusion was simple," said I. "Years ago I heard your brother say the same thing." "Oh! Well it does express the case exactly. Henderson was always a wonderful man for thinking, David. In his young days he was perfectly happy with a book. There were not many books in our valley, but he read them all and it was very interesting to hear the ideas he formed from them. He was a wonderful talker." Rufus Blight nodded his head reminiscently. "A wonderful talker. But when it came to practical things he was quite helpless. It wasn't that he was lazy. If there had been at hand anything big to do, anything that appealed to him, he would have done it. What he needed was an opportunity. He really never had half a chance. He did try working in the store with me--and he tried hard, but a mind like his could not be happy measuring out sugar and counting eggs. Such work seemed to lead to nothing--I know it did to me. But I had a different kind of a mind. I had to feed it, like a machine, with figures and facts. But to him it was of no importance that butter had gone up a cent a pound. He would say that the ants weren't worried about it, nor the birds, nor the people of other planets. Do you know, David, I really used to envy Hendry his way of seeing things." For a few moments Rufus Blight was silent, and my eyes were on the picture of the great mills to which the counting of sugar and eggs had led. From the mills they wandered to what they had given the man who built them, from the golf sticks to the prints of trotting horses and to the litter on the table. This den measured the true extent of his conquest. I looked at him. With a movement of weariness he stretched his feet toward the fire and leaned back and gazed at the ceiling, with a whimsical smile playing around the corners of his mouth.