"Why, I _like_ doing a little job of this sort." [Picture: Uncle Podger admiring his work] And then he would have another try, and, at the second blow, the nail would go clean through the plaster, and half the hammer after it, and Uncle Podger be precipitated against the wall with force nearly sufficient to flatten his nose.
Then we had to find the rule and the string again, and a new hole was made; and, about midnight, the picture would be up--very crooked and insecure, the wall for yards round looking as if it had been smoothed down with a rake, and everybody dead beat and wretched--except Uncle Podger.
"There you are," he would say, stepping heavily off the chair on to the charwoman's corns, and surveying the mess he had made with evident pride.
"Why, some people would have had a man in to do a little thing like that!" Harris will be just that sort of man when he grows up, I know, and I told him so.

I said I could not permit him to take so much labour upon himself.

I said: "No; _you_ get the paper, and the pencil, and the catalogue, and George write down, and I'll do the work." The first list we made out had to be discarded.

It was clear that the upper reaches of the Thames would not allow of the navigation of a boat sufficiently large to take the things we had set down as indispensable; so we tore the list up, and looked at one another! George said: "You know we are on a wrong track altogether.

We must not think of the things we could do with, but only of the things that we can't do without." George comes out really quite sensible at times.