Mr. Trood often stood and watched Jordan for the pleasure of the sight. It was the most perfect style he had ever seen. He was a theorist and calculated that Kellock produced the very greatest amount of physical power for the least possible expenditure of muscular loss; while others, who made as good paper as he, squandered thousands of pounds of dynamical energy by a stroke full of superfluous gesture. But the stroke is never the same in any two vatmen. It develops, with each artificer’s knowledge of the craft, to produce that highly co-ordinated effort embraced in the operation of making a sheet of paper. Mr. Knox operated at the next vat and offered an object lesson. He did the same things that Kellock did; dipped his mould, drew it to him, brought it squarely out, jogged to right and left and gave that subtle, complex touch of completion; yet in his achievement a wholly different display met the observer. It seemed that he performed a piece of elaborate ritual before the altar of the vat. He bowed his head to right and left; he moved his tongue and his knees; he jerked his elbows and bent his back over the trough as a priest consecrating the elements of some sacramental mass. Then he bowed and nodded once more and the created sheet emerged from his mould. The effect was grotesque, and seen at a little distance a stranger had supposed that Mr. Knox was simply playing the fool for the amusement of his coucher and layer; but in reality he was working hard and making as fine and perfect paper as Kellock himself. His muscles were tuned to his task; he had lifted his sheer weight of forty tons or more by the end of the day and was none the worse for it. Nor could he have omitted one gesture from his elaborate style without upsetting everything and losing his stroke. So the transformation became accomplished and the millions of linen and cotton fibres scooped on to the mould ran into a thin mat or wad, which was a piece of paper. Why all these fragile and microscopic atoms should become so inter-twisted and mingled that they produce an integral fabric, it is difficult to understand; but this was the result of the former processes; and those to come would change the slab of wet, newly created stuff—now no more than a piece of soaked blotting-paper—to the perfected sheet. His stroke accomplished and the sediment levelled on the mould, Kellock brought his mould to the “stay”—a brass-bound ledge on his left hand. He lifted the deckle from it as he did so and the full mould was drawn up the stay to the “asp,” where his coucher stood. Then Kellock clasped the deckle on to his second mould, now returned from the coucher, and dipped again, while his assistant, taking the full mould from the asp, turned it over on to the accumulating pile of sheets rising on his plank. Then he ran the empty mould back along the bridge to Kellock’s hand and drew to himself the next full mould now waiting for him on the stay.