Notes from the Bench

A man brought in an old slide projector days before his anniversary, the lamp dead and the loaded tray jammed fast. The lamp and the changer were an afternoon's work. Proving them was the harder problem, because a projector is proved by what it throws, and the tray was forty years of somebody's life.

A man of about fifty brought in his mother's treadle sewing machine to be made ready to sell, and told me it had just stopped. The wear underneath said a hand had been inside it within the month, and the second field of a ticket takes the owner's words, not mine.