CHAPTER II.

DURDLES, SCULPTOR; AND HONEYTHUNDER, AVENGER.

DURDLES at work. Impossibilities become possibilities, and falsehoods absolute facts — just as while all the Old philosophers were demonstrating, with a laborious persistency and an equally laborious folly, that no vessel propelled by the steam of a kettle could ever cross the great ocean, and that no needle could ever be induced to carry a thread regularly through any fabric, by blind mechanical power — the New philosophers were quietly perfecting the ocean-steamer and inventing the sewing-machine.

An anomaly, certainly, and yet no less a truth. Durdles, known never to be at work, actually at work — and at work with a will, whatever there might have been, or failed to be, of that judgment which should control the will, and without which it is somewhat more dangerous than indecision.

And Durdles sober. At least so nearly freed from the habitual sottishness of his ordinary life, that if it hung around him like a murky atmosphere it did not envelop him in its close embrace like an impenetrable fog. Grim, stolid, heavy-looking and stone-dusty as ever, there was yet something about the man, just then, elevating him above the wholly-debased and sordid, if it could not lift him into the realm where dwells romantic interest. Perhaps it lifted him even there, in spite of dirt, squalor, ignorance, ill-temper, drunkenness. We are not very expert at measuring personal positions or calculating moral distances — most of us; and Stony Durdles may at some moment be found quite as severe a strain upon the mathematical faculties, as the new planet discovered last month, or the comet that is to flaunt its luminous tail in our view next year.

It has already been said of the Stony One, that fame called him a wonderful workman, while actual observation only saw him doing nothing, with much accompaniment of two-foot rule, dinner-bundle, accepted outlawry, and self - satisfied comments upon himself in the third person. Who knows, meanwhile, but Fame — who must possess wonderful (if never mentioned) ears, to gather up all the intelligence spread abroad in the world through the medium of her trumpeting mouth — may have been wiser than the speakers who saw and heard at a lower level, may even have caught the occasional clink of a hammer and chisel the use of which brought the dusty old stone-mason within the scope of her duties?

Then, too, Fame may have had an assistant or two, the post of observation being the ordinary level. Who knows but Mr.Tope, the verger, so likely to be acquainted with allthe minor details of the lives of those with whom he was much thrown in contact — and Mr. Crisparkle, so careful of the grammatical accuracy of Durdles’ language when addressing his Reverence the Dean — may have been the means through whom there crept to the outer world of Cloisterham certain indefinite rumors of an ability belied by every