r upon a reality. What say you, daughter
Annie?"

"Pray don't speak so loud, father," whispered Annie, "Robert Danforth
will hear you."

"And what if he should hear me?" said Peter Hovenden. "I say again, it
is a good and a wholesome thing to depend upon main strength and
reality, and to earn one's bread with the bare and brawny arm of a
blacksmith. A watchmaker gets his brain puzzled by his wheels within a
wheel, or loses his health or the nicety of his eyesight, as was my
case, and finds himself at middle age, or a little after, past labor at
his own trade and fit for nothing else, yet too poor to live at his
ease. So I say once again, give me main strength for my money. And
then, how it takes the nonsense out of a man! Did you ever hear of a
blacksmith being such a fool as Owen Warland yonder?"

"Well said, uncle Hovenden!" shouted Robert Danforth from the forge, in
a full, deep, merry voice, that made the roof re-echo. "And what says
Miss Annie to that doctrine? She, I suppose, will think it a genteeler
business to tinker up a lady's watch than to forge a horseshoe or make
a gridiron."

Annie drew her father onward without giving him time for reply.

But we must return to Owen Warland's shop, and spend more meditation
upon his history and character than either Peter Hovenden, or probably
his daughter Annie, or Owen's old school-fellow, Robert Danforth, would
have thought due to so slight a subject. From the time that his little
fingers could grasp a penknife, Owen had been remarkable for a delicate
ingenuity, which sometimes produced pretty shapes in wood, principally
figures of flowers and birds, and sometimes seemed to aim at the hidden
mysteries of mechanism. But it was always for purposes of grace, and
never with any mockery of the useful. He did not, like the crowd of
school-boy artisans, construct little windmills on the angle of a barn
or watermills across the neighboring brook. Those who discovered such
peculiarity in the boy as to think it worth their while to observe him
closely, sometimes saw reason to suppose that he was attempting to
imitate the beautiful movements of Nature as exemplified in the flight
of birds or the activity of little animals. It seemed, in fact, a new
development of the love of the beautiful, such as might have made him a
poet, a painter, or a sculptor, and which was as completely refined
from all utilitarian coarseness as it could have been in either of the
fine arts. He look