A Question of Personality by H.C. McNeile

The personally conducted tour round Frenton's Steel Works paused, as usual, on reaching the show piece of the entertainment. The mighty hammer, operated with such consummate ease by the movement of a single lever, though smaller than its more celebrated brother at Woolwich Arsenal, never failed to get a round of applause from the fascinated onlookers. There was something almost frightening about the deadly precision with which it worked, and the uncanny accuracy of the man who controlled it. This time it would crash downwards delivering a blow which shook the ground: next time it would repeat the performance, only to stop just as the spectators were bracing themselves for the shock -- stop with such mathematical exactitude that the glass of a watch beneath it would be cracked but the works would not be damaged.

For years now, personally conducted tours had come round Frenton's works. Old Frenton was always delighted when his friends asked him if they might take their house-parties round: he regarded it as a compliment to himself. For he had made the works, watched them grow and expand till now they were known throughout the civilized world. They were just part of him, the fruit of his brain -- born of labour and hard work and nurtured on the hard-headed business capacity of the rugged old Yorkshireman. He was a millionaire now, many times over, but he could still recall the day when sixpence extra a day had meant the difference between chronic penury and affluence. And in those far-off days there had come a second resolve into his mind to keep the first and ever present one company. That first one had been with him ever since he could remember anything -- the resolve, to succeed; the second one became no less deep rooted. When he did succeed he'd pay his men such wages that there would never be any question of sixpence a day making a difference. The labourer was worthy of his hire: out of the sweat of his own brow John Frenton had evolved that philosophy for himself.