They went back to the smithy, and there, the very day of his arrival, more to Simon’s delight than he cared to show, the soft-handed bookbinder began to wield a hammer and shape the stubborn iron. So deft and persevering was he that before they left the forge that same night, he could not only bend the iron to a proper curve round the beak of the anvil, but had punched the holes in half a dozen shoes. At last he confessed himself weary. When his grandfather saw the state of his hands, blistered and swollen so that he could not even close them, he was no longer able to restrain his satisfaction.

“Come,” he cried, “you’re a man after all, bookbinder! In six months I could make you into a thorough blacksmith!”

“I wouldn’t undertake to make a bookbinder of you, grandfather,” returned Richard.

“Just as well, I should leave black marks all over your white pages. How much of them do you read now, as you stick them together?”

“Not a word as I stick them together. But many books are brought to me to be mended and doctored up, and from some of them I take part of my pay in reading them—scarce books, I mean, that I wouldn’t otherwise find it easy to lay my hands upon.”

“You would like to go to Oxford, wouldn’t you, lad—and read enough to last the rest of your life?”

“You might as well think to eat enough in one year to last the rest of your life, grandfather! Learning, like eating, must go on every day. Today’s lesson won’t always get you through tomorrow. But I would like to be able to lay in a stock of the tools to be got at Oxford. It would be grand to be able to pick the lock of any door I wanted to see the other side of.”

“I served my time to a locksmith,” returned Armour. “But we didn’t hit it off, and so hit one another. When my time was up I couldn’t get locksmith’s work, and as I was always getting into rows, I started up for myself as a general blacksmith, in a small way, of course. But my right hand hasn’t forgotten its technique in locks. I’ll teach you to pick the cunningest locks in the world, whether made in Italy or China.”

“The lock I was thinking of,” said Richard, “was that of the tree of knowledge.”

“I’ve heard,” returned Simon with more humour than accuracy, “that that was a rather peculiar lock, kept red-hot all the time by a flaming sword.”

“You don’t say you believe that story, grandfather?”

“I don’t say what I believe or what I don’t believe. The flaming iron I’ve had to do with has both kept me out of knowledge and led me into knowledge. You see, lad, when I was a boy I thought everything my mother said and my father did was old-fashioned and a bit ignorant. But when I was a man, I saw that, if I had started right off from where they set me down, I would have been further ahead. To honour your father and mother doesn’t mean you’ll stick by their chimney corner all your life, but to start from their front door and go forward. I went out by the back door, like the fool I was. To get into the front road, I had a long round to make before I could even get started.”