our master. Learn all you can and
get a smithy of your own. A good blacksmith is as respectable as a good
artist," he said, looking at me keenly, as he mounted his horse, and
then rode rapidly through the village street.

CHAPTER II.

I was no proud-spirited hero to work my way independently in the world,
but a poor blacksmith's apprentice, glad of every penny honestly earned
or kindly given; so I handled my bill over and over again with real
pleasure. Amos Bray, my master, was about as well to do as any man in
the village, its doctor excepted; but I doubted if Amos ever had a
ten-dollar bill over and above the quarter's expenses to spend as he
liked.

The smithy often glowed with the double fire of its forge and my fancy.
I walked about with a picture-gallery in my brain, and was usually led
into its rather meagre display whenever the past was recalled or the
future portrayed. The smithy hung there, in warmth and brightness, a
genuine Rembrandt of light and shadow, filled with many an odd,
picturesque group on winter evenings, or just at twilight, when the fire
had died away to its embers. My master had gone home, and work was over;
the village children in gay woollen garments and with ruddy faces
crowded round the door, fringing brightly the canopy of darkness within.

Again, when, after days of monotonous work, I felt a benumbing sense of
being but a part of the world's giant machinery, chosen because the
mobility and suppleness of human material worked by the steam-power of
the brain were more than a match even for the durability and unwearied
stroke of steel or iron, the warm blood rushed back, life throbbed again
with its endless ebbs and flows of desire and disappointment, as my
master's daughter, with her golden hair and innocent eyes, summoned us
to dinner, breaking like blue sky and sunshine through the cloud-rifts
of our toil.

But now the smithy was not merely idealized, it was transformed. The
stranger, whose haughty bearing and address had changed to kindly and
appreciative words, had filled it with a new presence and excited new
hopes.

Pleased as I was with the unexpected gift of money, the stranger's hint
of my superiority to those around me was a more generous bounty still. I
had been jeered at for years by the village boys, because I never
followed my master to the tavern in the evenings to listen to the gossip
there and learn to drink my mug of beer, and because I rarely talked
with any one