An Unlikely Peon
Observed in the wild, from a book I was reading this morning:
Adam Smith … opens The Wealth of Nations with an unlikely peon to a pin factory.
Sounds like the first few scenes in a Dickensian novel—the unlikely peon (because, as will be revealed later, he is really the heir to a large fortune) is sent by his bitter guardian to work cutting, drawing and polishing pins. Or, seeing as it’s Smith, doing only one of these things.