st!

What a tremendous power there is in work. Carlstrom worked. He was up
early in the morning to work, and he worked in the evening as long as
daylight lasted, and once I found him in his shop in the evening,
bending low over his bench with a kerosene lamp in front of him. He was
humming his inevitable tune and smoothing off with a fine file the nice
curves of a rifle trigger. When he had trouble--and what a lot of it he
has had in his time!--he worked; and when he was happy he worked all the
harder. All the leisurely ones of the town drifted by, all the children
and the fools, and often rested in the doorway of his shop. He made them
all welcome: he talked with them, but he never stopped working. Clang,
clang, would go his anvil, whish, whish, would respond his bellows,
creak, creak, would go the hickory sweep--he was helping the world go
round!

All this time, though he had sickness in his family, though his wife
died, and then his children one after another until only one now
remains, he worked and he saved. He bought a lot and built a house to
rent; then he built another house; then he bought the land where his
shop stands and rebuilt the shop itself. It was an epic of homely work.
He took part in the work of the church and on election days he changed
his coat, and went to the town hall to vote.

[Illustration: "THE CHILDREN ... OFTEN RESTED IN THE DOORWAY OF HIS
SHOP"]

In the years since I have known the old gunsmith and something of the
town where he works, I have seen young men, born Americans, with every
opportunity and encouragement of a free country, growing up there and
going to waste. One day I heard one of them, sitting in front of a
store, grumbling about the foreigners who were coming in and taking up
the land. The young man thought it should be prevented by law. I said
nothing; but I listened and heard from the distance the steady clang,
clang, of Carlstrom's hammer upon the anvil.

Ketchell, the store-keeper, told me how Carlstrom had longed and planned
and saved to be able to go back once more to the old home he had left.
Again and again he had got almost enough money ahead to start, and then
there would be an interest payment due, or a death in the family, and
the money would all go to the banker, the doctor, or the undertaker.

"Of recent years," said Ketchell, "we thought he'd given up the idea.
His friends are all here now, and if he went back, he certainly would
be disappointed."

A so