CHAPTER IV. MY FIRST VIEW OF THE HILL. It turned out not so badly, yet pretty badly. Uncle Jenico took cheap lodgings for us in the town, and for two or three months was busy flitting between Ipswich and London winding up my father’s estate. At the end, when the value of every lot, stick, and warrant had been realised, and the creditors satisfied, a sum representing perhaps £150 a year was secured to us, and with this, and the despatch-box, we committed ourselves to the future. It appeared that my Uncle Jenico’s inventions had always been more creditable than profitable to him, and this for the reason that unattainable capital was necessary to their working. Given a few hundreds, he was confident that he could make thousands out of any one of them. It was hard, for the lack of a little fuel, so to speak, to have so much power spoiling on one’s hands. I would have had him, when once I understood, invest our own capital in some of them; but, though I could see he loved me for the suggestion, he had the better strength of affection to keep loyal to his trust, which he administered scrupulously according to the law. Afterwards, when I came to know him better, I could not but be thankful that he had shown this superior genius for honesty; for his faith in his own concerns was so complete, and at the same time so naïve, that he might otherwise have lacked nothing but the guilt to be a defaulter. As to the patents themselves, they represented a hundred phases of craft, every one of which delighted and convinced me by its originality. There was a design amongst them for an automatic dairy-maid, a machine which, by exhausting the air in a number of flexible tubes, could milk twenty cows at once. There was a design for making little pearls large, by inserting them like setons in the shells of living oysters. There was a plan for a ship to be driven by a portable windmill, which set a turbine spinning under the stern. Uncle Jenico’s contrivances were mostly on an heroic scale, and covered every form of enterprise--from the pill which was to eliminate dyspepsia from the land, to a scheme for liquidating the National Debt by pawning all England for a term of years to an International Trust. At the same time, there was no human need too mean for his consideration. He was for ever striving to economise labour for the betterment of his poorer fellow-creatures. His inventiveness was a great charity, which did not even begin at home. His patents, from being designed to improve any condition but his own, suffered the neglect of a world to which selfishness is the first principle of business competence. His “Napina,” a liquid composition from which old clothes, after having been dipped therein, re-emerged as new, could find no market. His “Labour-of-Love Spit,” which was turned by a rocking-chair moving a treadle, like that on a knife-grinder’s machine, so that the cook could roast her joint in great comfort while