Before another Sunday, there came, doubtless by his mother’s management, an invitation to spend a few weeks with his grandfather, the blacksmith.

Richard was not altogether pleased, for he did not like leaving his work, but his mother again prevailed with him, and he agreed to go. In this, as in most things, he showed her a deference such as few young men show their mothers. Her influence came, I presume, through the strong impression of purpose she had made on him.

His father objected to his going, and grumbled a good deal. As the brewer looks down on the baker, so the bookbinder looked down on the blacksmith.

He said the people Richard would see about his grandfather, were not fit company. But knowing the necessity of such a change, he acquiesced.

— Three —

Simon Armour

Simon Armour was past the agility but not the strength of his youth, and he was still proud of his feats of might. Without being offensively conceited, he regarded himself superior to any gentleman. All he looked for from any man, whether above or below him on the social scale, was proper pay for good work and natural human respect. Several of the surrounding gentry enjoyed the free, jolly, but unpresuming carriage of the stalwart old man who could still ply a sledge hammer in each hand. He gave friendly good fellowship to the nobleman or visitor from Mortgrange who occasionally stopped at his forge to give him some direction about the shoeing of this or that horse, and he was generally well-liked by those lower than himself as well.

He was a hard-featured, good-looking, white-haired man of sixty, with piercing eyes of deep blue and a rough voice with an undertone of music in it. There was music, indeed, all through him. In the roughest part of his history it was his habit to go to church—almost entirely for the organ. How much he understood may be a question somewhat dependent on how much there may have been to understand. But he had a few ideas in religion which were very much his own, and which, especially with regard to certain of the lessons from the Old Testament, would have considerably astonished some parsons, and considerably pleased others. He was a big, broad-shouldered man, with brawny arms, and eyes so bright that one might fancy they caught and kept for their own use the sparks that flew from his hammer. His face was red, with a great short white beard, suggesting the sun in a clean morning fog.

A rickety omnibus carried Richard from the railway station some five miles to the smithy. When the old man heard it stop, he threw down his hammer, strode hastily to the door, met his grandson with a grip that left a black mark and an ache, and picked up his case and set it down in his workshop.

“I’ll be with you in a moment, lad!” he said, and with that seized a horseshoe that lay on the anvil with a long pair of pincers, thrust it into the fire, blew a great roaring blast from the bellows, plucked out the shoe—now growing white—and fell upon it as if it were a devil. Having thus cowed it a bit, he grew calm and more deliberately shaped it to an invisible idea. His grandson was delighted with the mingling of determination, intent and power, with certainty of result manifest in every blow. In two minutes he had the shoe on the end of a long hooked rod, and was hanging it beside others on a row of nails in a beam. Then he turned and said, “There, lad! That’s off the anvil, and off my mind. Now for you!”