Oliver saw Harry Stanhope standing without his coat, bareheaded, on his half-laden cart, ‘forking’ his sheaves of corn, and knew that was one thing in the estimation of the world and kneading dough was quite another. There was as great a difference between them as that between a bar of iron and a twopenny nail. Yet Oliver remembered the American philosopher Thoreau, and his delight in the sign of self-sufficing independence which he recognised in the act of baking his own bread. What a manly, ay, a kingly work Thoreau had made of it, as historians and poets had dealt with the picturesque initiatory steps taken by Cincinnatus when the patriot returned from saving his country in the ranks of war, to plough, and reap, and gather in the fruits of his own peaceful fields. Thoreau baked for his own hand, at his own will and pleasure. He was a republican of republicans—to whom not only courts and thrones were repugnant, but who, while he had no quarrel with his kind, sought to know the feelings of a wild man—alone with the marvellous hordes of lower animals whom he understood and loved, and who repaid him with their trust—alone with Nature as she came from the hands of her Maker. Thus Thoreau had steeped his rough bread-making in reflections which had lent it a hue at once primitive and solemn. There was another man dubbed a baker, whether he would or not, nicknamed in wanton mockery because he could not furnish bread for his famished people; a shy, shrinking man, not altogether without the dignity of the line of a hundred kings—of St. Louis himself, blended with the native dignity of innocent intentions in the midst of his weakness, and with the pathos of a martyr for the sins of his fathers and evil advisers, as he stood forward in the window of his palace, wearing the red cap of anarchy for the crown of sovereignty, while France heard him hailed, not as the monarch—not as ‘Louis le Desiré,’ but as ‘Louis Capet, the Baker.’ There was still another figure engaged in the homely occupation that rose up then in the Friarton bakehouse. He had been introduced to Oliver and to thousands more in the president’s speech at the close of one of the Royal Society’s meetings. Oliver was not intimately acquainted with the man, as the hero when he had passed from this world was happily to be rendered familiar to the whole reading public. But the miller and baker of Friarton—a distinct specimen of his kind—had got from the president’s speech a general idea of that other master baker, and rejoiced and gloried in him.