still remember very distinctly my uncle's talk,—he loved to speak “reet Staffordshire”—his rather flabby face with the mottled complexion that told of crude ill-regulated appetites, his clumsy gestures—he kept emphasising his points by prodding at me with his finger—the ill-worn, costly, grey tweed clothes, the watch chain of plain solid gold, and soft felt hat thrust back from his head. He tackled me first in the garden after lunch, and then tried to raise me to enthusiasm by taking me to his potbank and showing me its organisation, from the dusty grinding mills in which whitened men worked and coughed, through the highly ventilated glazing room in which strangely masked girls looked ashamed of themselves,—“They'll risk death, the fools, to show their faces to a man,” said my uncle, quite audibly—to the firing kilns and the glazing kilns, and so round the whole place to the railway siding and the gratifying spectacle of three trucks laden with executed orders.
Then we went up a creaking outside staircase to his little office, and he showed off before me for a while, with one or two subordinates and the telephone.
“None of your Gas,” he said, “all this. It's Real every bit of it. Hard cash and hard glaze.”
“Yes,” I said, with memories of a carelessly read pamphlet in my mind, and without any satirical intention, “I suppose you MUST use lead in your glazes?”
Whereupon I found I had tapped the ruling grievance of my uncle's life. He hated leadless glazes more than he hated anything, except the benevolent people who had organised the agitation for their use. “Leadless glazes ain't only fit for buns,” he said. “Let me tell you, my boy—”
He began in a voice of bland persuasiveness that presently warmed to anger, to explain the whole matter. I hadn't the rights of