As he reached my side, I slipped a shilling into his half-concealed palm. So do we assess our fellow-kind! The instinct is bestial, but ingrained. Honour, virtue and the like--we only call them priceless to ourselves; yet it takes a great deal to convince us that they are not priceless to others. I priced my blind beggar at a shilling! I watched his withered fingers close over it, rubbing against the minted edge that he might know its worth! "That has won him," I thought. Ah! What a brutal conception of God’s handicraft! A shilling to buy the secret of perpetual motion! Surely I could not have thought that Nature would have sold her mysteries for that! I did. There is the naked truth of it. "Who gives me this?" he asked, still fingering it as though it yet might burn his hand. "A friend," said I. "God’s blessing on ye," he answered and his fingers finally held it tight. There he kept it, clutched within his hand. No pocket was safe in the clothes he wore to store such fortune as that. "You’re leaving Rathmore after the Pattern, I suppose?" I began. His head nodded as he tapped his stick. "There’s something I want to ask you before you go," I continued. He stopped, I with him, watching the suspicions pass across his face. "Someone has told me----" I sought desperately, clumsily, for my satisfaction now. "Someone has told me that you have found the secret of perpetual motion. Is that true?" The milk-white, sightless eyes rushed querulously to mine. All the expression of yearning to see seemed to lie hidden behind them. A flame that was not a flame--the ghost of a flame burnt there, intense with questioning. He could not see; I knew he could not see; yet those vacant globes of matter were charged with unerring perception. In that moment, his soul was looking into mine, searching it for integrity, scouring the very corners of it for the true reason of my question. I met his gaze. It seemed then to me, that if I failed and my eyes fell before his, he would have weighed and found me wanting. It is one of the few things in this world which I count to my credit, that those empty sockets found me worthy of the trust. "Who told ye that?" he asked. I answered him truthfully that I did not know. "But is it the case?" I added. He shifted his position. I could see that he was listening. "There is no one on the road," I said--"We are quite alone." He coughed nervously. "’Tis a matter of fifteen years since I first thought the thing out at all. Shure, I dunno what made it come into me head; but ’twas the way I used to be working in a forge before I lost the sight of my eyes. I thought of it there, I suppose." He stopped and I prompted him. "What principle did you go on?" I asked--"Was it magnetism? How did you set to work to avoid friction?" This time, as he looked at me, his eyes were expressionless. I felt that he was blind. He had not understood a word I had said.