His was a very pleasant mood to drift in and lounge and taste the soothing savor of irony, which dulls sharp edges and tempers the emphasis of optimism or pessimism. It seems to deliver the soul from its desire for relief and sops its hunger with a comfortable pity. But it is a lie. Old Mole knew it not for what it was and hugged it to himself, and called it wisdom, and he began to write a satire on education as he had known it in Thrigsby. He reveled in the physical labor of writing, in the company of his ideas as they took shape in the furnace of concentration, and what he had intended to be a short pamphlet grew into an elaborate account of his twenty-five years of respectable and respected service, showing the slow submergence of the human being into the machine evolved for the creation of other machines. . . . He was weeks and months over it. The tour did not come to an end as had been anticipated, but was continued through the holiday months at the seaside resorts. They returned to Blackpool in August, and then he finished his work and read it to Edwin Watts. The musician had an enormous reverence for the printed word, and had never met an author before. His emotionalism warmed up and colored the dryness and bitterness of Old Mole's tale, and he saw in it only a picture of suppression and starved imagination like his own. He applauded, and Old Mole was proud of his firstborn and determined to publish it. In his early days he had revised and prepared a book of Examination Papers in Latin accidence for a series, and to the publisher he sent his "Syntax and Sympathy." It had really moved Edwin Watts, and he composed in its honor a sonata in B flat, which he dedicated "To the mute, inglorious Miltons of Lancashire." It was played on the pier by a municipal band, but did not immediately produce any ebullition of genius. When Old Mole told Matilda that he had written a book she asked: "Is it a story?" "A sort of story." "Has it a happy ending? I can't see why people write stories that make you miserable." "It's a wonderful book," said Edwin Watts. And Old Mole said: "I flatter myself there are worse books written." When Watts had gone Matilda said: "If it's not a nice book I couldn't bear it." "What do you mean--you couldn't bear it?" "If it's like that Lucretius you're so fond of I'd be ashamed." In the intoxication that still endured from the fumes of writing he had been thinking that the book was not incomparable with "De Rerum Natura," something between that and the Satires of Juvenal. In a few weeks his manuscript returned with a polite letter from the publisher declining it, desiring to see more of Mr. Beenham's work, and enclosing his reader's report. It was short: