Yet, as iron will bend to different uses, so will the workers in iron. Twenty years later the younger of that generation of smiths were painting above their shop doors, Motor Repairs a Speciality, and, greatly daring, taking mechanism to pieces which they had no idea how they were going to put together again. They made many mistakes, which passed undetected because the owners had no more knowledge than they had of the inside of “the dratted thing,” and they soon learned by experiment sufficient to enable them to put on a wise air of authority. Then the legend over the door was repainted, “Motor Expert,” and expert many of them became in a surprisingly short time, for they brought the endless patience and ingenuity of the craftsman to the new mechanism, plus his adaptable skill.

28

Growing Pains

But the holidays at Candleford only occupied a small part of Laura’s year. At the end of a month or so a letter would come saying that school would begin on the following Monday and she had to return. Excepting the arrival of a new baby or two, or the settling of a stray swarm of bees on somebody’s apple-tree, nothing ever seemed to have happened in the hamlet while she had been away. The neighbours would still be discussing the same topics. The crops were good, or “but middling,” according to the season. Someone had nearly a half-bushel more corn from their gleanings than the rest of the hamlet, and that was a mystery to others, who declared they had worked just as hard and spent even more hours afield. “A bit of rick-pulling there, I’ll warrant.” After a dry summer the water in the wells would be dangerously low, but it had not given out yet, and, “Please God, us shall get a nice drop of rain ‘fore long. The time of year’s getting on to when we may look for it.” “Look for it! He! He! It’ll come whether you looks for it or not. Nice weather for young ducks and mud up to y’r knees when you goes round to the well, you’ll see, before you knows where you are.”

She found the hamlet unchanged every year; but, beyond the houses, everything had altered, for it was still summer when she went away and when she returned it was autumn. Along the hedgerows hips and haws and crab-apples were ripe and the ivory parchment flowers of the traveller’s joy had become silver and silky. The last of the harvest had been carried and already the pale stubble was greening over. Soon the sheep would be turned into the fields to graze, then the ploughs would come and turn the earth brown once more.