In each department, hidden behind gorgeous, flowing curtains, were time-clocks, on which employees rang up when they came to work, and when they left. Also, each worker was supposed to receive dividends--which dividends consisted in pairs of mittens and thick woolen socks distributed by the foremen at Christmas time ... or maybe an extra dollar in pay, that week. "Two dollars a week less than a fellow would draw at any other place that ran the same sort of business," grumbled a young bookbinder who was by way of being a poet, "and a pair of woolen mittens or socks, or an extra dollar, once a year, as dividends!" However, I think that the artworkers had finer lodgings and board than most workers could have supplied for themselves ... and the married couples lived in nicer houses ... and they heard the best music, had the best books to read, lived truly in the presence of the greatest art and thought of the world ... and heard speak in the chapel, from time to time, all the distinguished men of the country ... who came, sooner or later, to visit Spalton and am? community.... What though the wages were not so big, what though you rang up the time of arrival at work and the time of departure from it, on hidden time-clocks, what though every piece of statuary, every picture, every stick of furniture, had, on the bottom of it, its price label, or, depending from it, its tag that told the price at which it might be bought!... * * * * * Spalton had begun his active career as a business man, had swung out from that, his fertile mind glimpsing what worlds of thought and imagination lay beyond it! But now Big Business was calling him back again, using him for its purposes. Oftener and oftener magnificently written articles by him began to appear in his remarkable little magazine, _The Dawn_. And the Ingersoll of Dollar Watch fame crowded out the Ingersoll of brave agnosticism ... and when he wrote now of artists and writers, it was their thrifty habits, their business traits, that he lauded. "A great man can be practical and businesslike, in fact the greatest of them always are," he defended. "There was Voltaire, the successful watchmaker at Ferney ... and there was Shakespeare, who, after his success in London, returned to Avon and practically bought up the whole town ... he even ran a butcher shop there, you know." * * * * * "The people expect startling things ... and, as the winds of genius blow where they list--when they refuse to blow in the direction required, divine is the art of buncombe," he jested.