The earl of Birndale was the magnate of the district. He was a tall, strong, coarse-looking man: had he chanced to have been born in the position of a coal-heaver, no one would have been surprised if he had been hauled up before a magistrate for beating his wife or for squaring his fists at any time and at any person as the humor seized him; or if he had been a wharf-porter, he would have heaved a load on his shoulders and carried it in a way to make puny specimens of the race sick with envy. But he was born the son of an earl, and the coal-heaver propensities had been trained and trimmed in patrician fashion. An earl on occasion may fly into a passion, but he may not beat his wife: the earl of Birndale did the one, and didn't do the other, nor was he in the least conscious of the undeveloped coal-heaver he carried about with him. On the contrary, his pride of birth and rank was enormous. His physical strength not having been exercised in carrying loads, it had brought him to his sixtieth year younger and more erect than many men of forty, and even yet he employed it in felling trees: a high civilization goes back for its amusement to what was the toil of primeval times. And he never walked about his property without a hammer and nails, so that if he came to any fence broken or breaking down, he could mend it, as was very right and proper; but when people hear of an earl, they connect the title with something lofty in the way of employment, and it is certain that the village joiner would have mended the fences better than the earl. But no doubt it was an innocent amusement, and _noblesse_ did not _oblige_ the earls of Birndale: every man of them had always done what was right in his own eyes. Why, the brother whom this earl had succeeded passed a good deal of his time knitting, but he was the only one of his race that had taken to that peaceful, aged-woman-looking employment: the rest had not knitted anything except their brows, and all of them had been pretty good at that.