ak, with which he covers up his
merchandise, flutter. Ah! now I know where he goes to pilfer iron
filings, which he sells for old papers, that barterer of a Garoffi! When
we arrived in front of the door, we saw Precossi seated on a little
pile of bricks, engaged in studying his lesson, with his book resting on
his knees. He rose quickly and invited us to enter. It was a large
apartment, full of coal-dust, bristling with hammers, pincers, bars, and
old iron of every description; and in one corner burned a fire in a
small furnace, where puffed a pair of bellows worked by a boy. Precossi,
the father, was standing near the anvil, and a young man was holding a
bar of iron in the fire.

"Ah! here he is," said the smith, as soon as he caught sight of us, and
he lifted his cap, "the nice boy who gives away railway trains! He has
come to see me work a little, has he not? I shall be at your service in
a moment." And as he said it, he smiled; and he no longer had the
ferocious face, the malevolent eyes of former days. The young man handed
him a long bar of iron heated red-hot on one end, and the smith placed
it on the anvil. He was making one of those curved bars for the rail of
terrace balustrades. He raised a large hammer and began to beat it,
pushing the heated part now here, now there, between one point of the
anvil and the middle, and turning it about in various ways; and it was a
marvel to see how the iron curved beneath the rapid and accurate blows
of the hammer, and twisted, and gradually assumed the graceful form of a
leaf torn from a flower, like a pipe of dough which he had modelled with
his hands. And meanwhile his son watched us with a certain air of pride,
as much as to say, "See how my father works!"

"Do you see how it is done, little master?" the blacksmith asked me,
when he had finished, holding out the bar, which looked like a bishop's
crosier. Then he laid it aside, and thrust another into the fire.

"That was very well made, indeed," my father said to him. And he added,
"So you are working--eh! You have returned to good habits?"

"Yes, I have returned," replied the workman, wiping away the
perspiration, and reddening a little. "And do you know who has made me
return to them?" My father pretended not to understand. "This brave
boy," said the blacksmith, indicating his son with his finger; "that
brave boy there, who studied and did honor to his father, while his
father rioted, and treated him like a dog. When