"Are ye trying to get the secret out av me?" he asked at length. "Shure, there’s many have done that. They all try and get it out av me. The blacksmith--him that was working at the forge where I was myself before I lost the sight in me eyes--he wanted to make the machine for me. But I’d known him before I was blind and I hadn’t lost the knowledge with me eyesight." "Are you making it yourself, then?" He nodded his head. "As well as I can," he continued--"but, shure, what can these fingers do with feeling alone--I must see what I’m doing. Faith, I’ve all the pieces here now in me pocket, only for the putting of ’em together, and glory be to God, I’ve tried and tried, but they won’t go. Ye can’t do it with feelin’ alone." Some lump threatened to rise in my throat. "Good God!" I thought--"this is tragedy----" And I looked in vain for sight in his eyes. "Would ye like to see the pieces?" he asked. I assured him that the secret would be safe in my keeping were he so generous. "No one about?" he asked. "Not a soul!" Then, from his pocket--one by one--he took them out and laid them down on a grass bank by our side. I watched each piece as he produced it and, with the placing of them on the bank of grass, I watched his face. These were the parts in the construction of his intricate mechanism that he showed to me--a foot of rod iron, a small tin pot that once perhaps had held its pound of coffee, a strip of hoop iron and an injured lock. "There," he said proudly--"but if I were to give these to that blacksmith, he’d steal the secret before my face. I wouldn’t trust him with ’em and I working these fifteen years." I thanked God he could not see my face then. The foot of rod iron! The small tin pot! The injured lock! They stared at me in derision. Only they and I knew the secret--only they and I could tell it, as they themselves had told it me. His wits were gone. Perpetual motion! The wretched man was mad. Perpetual motion out of these rusty old things--rusting for fifteen years in the corners of his pockets! Perpetual motion!