‘Well, well, I deserved it, at least. I was a man possessed with an idea and no money—an unlucky combination for mortals who are obliged to eat to live. I learnt my trade as a youth, and one day in my master’s shop I chanced upon a piece of refuse glass of peculiar quality. I showed it to my master, but he scarcely looked at it. He was a man of no ideas beyond his daily work. There was that about this piece of glass, however, which set me thinking, and filled me with an idea of such strength as to be called infatuation. It has been like a stone of Sisyphus to me till this day, and now I have conquered it. For twenty‐five years I have worked to discover the secret of that stray piece of glass, more or less madly—eagerly—according to circumstances, but always constantly. My father, when he died, left me a little hoard of money. Then I left my master and built a workshop of my own. It was then, too, I married my sweetheart; and like a young, eager, hot‐blooded, thoughtless lad, would have laughed to scorn the notion of a space of twenty‐five years being necessary to the working out of my problem, had it been told to me at that time. “Come,” I said to myself, “my money will keep us a couple of years, and by that time, I shall have found out my secret, and fortune will lie before me.” In two years I was as far off the end as ever—do you remember, Tibia? In three years I was further still, for we had struggled on, in vain hope that each day would solve the mystery, and my patrimony had come to an end in the process. Every experiment was as futile as the one before it, and I had become numb even to bitter disgust and despair. Ah, and how I worked! Night and day—it was like a fever dream. And you, Tibia, would come to help—it was your presence that helped more than your hands, wife. Then came the day when the last coin had been spent in fuel for the furnace, and the experiment had failed as miserably as all the others before it. It was dusk as I tested my work and found it wanting, and I sat down stupid and sick. I began to dream horribly, or else a fever had reached my brain. I sat there like a helpless log, as if bound hand and foot, whilst the walls seemed to dance around me in a giddy whirl, and the roof to rear up and swoop down upon me with a frightful sensation that will live in my memory till I die. Then in that dread hour it was you who crept in beside me. Yet you did nothing but lay your hand silently on mine, and that saved me. You remember it, Tibia?—I cried like a girl. I was overwrought in mind and body. I was like the steel blade which is strained in a curve beyond its strength, and then snaps, to spring and quiver no more. That night we begged our supper, and next morning I rose another being. I was a dreaming youth no longer, and I set to work to make pots like my dull master, and allow my phantasy to find its opportunities for indulgence, when time and means allowed. I did not do this from change