Hester waltzed round the room, and dropped a very low courtesy before Uncle Fritz in acknowledgment of his compliment; and all the others clapped their hands. They asked her, more clamorously than Uncle Fritz, what she had found. "I have found a man--" "That is more than Diogenes could." "Horace, I shall send you out of the room, or back on first principles. Do you not know that it is not nice to interrupt?" "I have found a man, Uncle Fritz, who is an inventor, a great inventor; and he is very nice, and he likes people and people like him, and he always succeeds,--his things turn out well, like Dr. Franklin's; and he says the world has always been grateful to him. He never sulks or complains; he knows all about the moon, and makes wonderful pictures of it; and he's enormously rich, I believe, too,--but that's not so much matter. The best of all is, that he began just as we begin. He had a nice father and a nice mother and a good happy home, and was brought up like good decent children. Now really, Uncle Fritz, you mustn't laugh; but do you not think that most of the people whose lives we read have to begin horridly? They have to be beaten when they are apprentices, or their fathers and mothers have to die, or they have to walk through Philadelphia with loaves of bread under their arms, or to be brought up in poor-houses or something. Now, nothing of that sort happened to my inventor. And I am very much encouraged. For my father never beat me, and my mother never scolded me half as much as I deserved, and I never was in a poor-house, and I never carried a loaf of bread under my arm, and so I really was afraid I should come to no good. But now I have found my new moon-man, I am very much encouraged." The others laughed heartily at Hester's zeal, and Blanche asked what Hester's hero had invented, and what was his name. The others turned to Uncle Fritz half incredulously. But Uncle Fritz came to Hester's relief. "Hester is quite right," he said; "and his name it is James Nasmyth. He has invented a great many things, quite necessary in the gigantic system of modern machine-building. He has chosen the steam-hammer for his device. Here is a picture of it on the outside of his Life. You see I was ready for you, Hester." The children looked with interest on the device, and Fergus said that it was making heraldry do as it should, and speak in the language of the present time. Then Uncle Fritz bade Hester find for them a passage in the biography where Mr. Nasmyth tells how he changed the old motto of the family. Oddly enough, the legend says that the first Nasmyth took his name after a romantic escape, when one of his pursuers, finding him disguised as a blacksmith, cried out, "Ye're _nae smyth_."