If you say that a beautiful thing is always interesting, I answer, that a beautiful thing is of the highest use.

Is not a diamond that flashes all its colours into the heart of a poet as useful as the diamond with which the glazier divides the sheets of glass into panes for our windows?
Anyhow, the reason Willie got tired of his water-wheel was that it went round and round, and did nothing but go round.

It drove no machinery, ground no grain of corn--"did nothing for _no_body," Willie said, seeking to be emphatic.

So he carried it home, and put it away in a certain part of the ruins where he kept odds and ends of things that might some day come in useful.
Mr Macmichael was so devoted to his profession that he desired nothing better for Willie than that he too should be a medical man, and he was more than pleased to find how well Willie's hands were able to carry out his contrivances; for he judged it impossible for a country doctor to have too much mechanical faculty.

The exercise of such a skill alone might secure the instant relief of a patient, and be the saving of him.
But, more than this, he believed that nothing tended so much to develop common sense--the most precious of faculties--as the doing of things with the hands.