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 except a few of the village children more modest than the
rest.
The alphabet of my mind, like that of the race, was first found in the
hieroglyphics of the pencil; and by its aid I communicated with my
little friends more frequently than by word, drawing pictures for them
with chalk on the rude walls of the smithy, and carving images of the
various devices my experience or imagination suggested out of wood with
my master's jack-knife.
From this group of children had arisen a constant companion and
sympathizer in my master's daughter. In leisure hours we explored the
woods together, or she sat beside me while I pored over the few old
books which were my father's sole legacy to me.
During the last winter and this, however, my evenings had been almost
constantly occupied in study and sketching at the class to which I have
alluded. What an endless store of drawing-materials now loomed before
me! And what a swelling of heart I experienced at the thought that the
aims for which I had been taunted by the villagers were acknowledged by
my new friend as a ground of superiority!
I was startled from these pleasing dreams by my master's voice.
"Hullo there, Sandy! where's the money for that job? He's a mean one, if
he a'n't made it double."
Instinctively I thrust my ten-dollar bill into one pocket, as I drew the
pay for the horseshoeing from the other. He swore a little as I handed
it to him, but he knew me well enough never to doubt my honesty; and, as
I was leaving, he called, with a gruff kindness,--the only approach to
courtesy of which he was capable,--
"Hurry up, Sandy; Miss Bray can't git Sary Ann to bed till she sees you,
and you're late for your schoolin' besides."
So I ground my way quickly through the snow, choosing the middle of the
street, because it was less worn, and helped me better to work off my
unusual excitement.
My master's cottage stood on the same street with his smithy. In fact,
this Main Street was, as its name indicated, the principal thoroughfare
of Warren; the real village life all centred here; and it contained,
besides the stores and the church, the dwellings of the more prosperous
inhabitants. The smithy being at one end, on the outskirts, as it were,
of the social and gay life, Mr. Bray had been able to rent it for a low
sum, although more pleasantly situated than any other building on the
street. Here the land made a slight ascent, giving a more extended view
of the valley and distant hills than at any other point. The business
character of this street mingled oddly in summer with the rural life
around it. At several right-angles, green and mossy lanes, arched by
venerable elms, seemed to be offering their crooked elbows to lead it
back to the simple pastoral life from which it sprang.
Bordering these sequestered paths, which were dignified by the title of
streets, were cottages surrounded by small inclosures, whose proprietors
cultivated vegetables, hens, pigs, and cows,--these last being, quite
unconsciously, the true surveyors of Warren; for, in direct obedience to
pathways they had worn when traversing the fields to and from their
homes, chewing the quiet cud of meditation, had the buildings been
erected. Outside these lanes, again, were the larger land-owners, whose
farms formed the outer circle of our life.
Annie Bray was fond of penetrating beyond these various circles of
social existence, and wandering far off to the woods and hills, whose
ring of emerald, studded now and then with the turquoise of some
forest-lake, inclosed us as in a basin.
As I entered the kitchen of the cottage, Mrs. Bray, a stout woman of
forty, the oracle of her sex in the village as to matters of domestic
economy and dress,--which last was of a more costly and varied material
than the others could afford, abounding in many-colored prints, and a
stuff gown for Sunday wear,--made her appearance, her apron covered with
flour, an incrustation of dough on each particular finger, which it
always destroyed my appetite to see.
"Well, Sandy, I'm glad you've come. You've jest sp'iled Sary Ann. There
she sets a-nid-nid-noddin' on that stool, and won't stir to bed till she
sees Sandy."
There, by the stove, sat the blacksmith's blue-eyed daughter, a proof
that God sometimes interferes with hereditary botch-work, and makes a
child fresh and fair, letting her, like a delicate flower in noisome
marsh or stagnant water, draw pure, nourishing juices out of elements
poisonous to anything less impregnated with Himself.
To be sure, through ignorance of the nature of the child intrusted to
them, the blacksmith and his wife blundered with her tender soul and
beautiful body. One of their most heinous crimes against her, in my
estimation, had been in the bestowal of the name of Sary Ann,--a filial
compliment paid by Mrs. Bray to the mother who bore her. Then they
dressed her in the brightest of red or orange, so that Nature, which had
tinted her complexion brightly, though delicately, seemed forever to be
put to shame by the brazen garments which infolded her. They called her
'sp'iled,' when her innocent eyes filled with tears at her father's
oaths or her mother's coarse scolding; and though her tender beauty
touched the rough smith with a kind of awe, he often said, "Such pootty
gals a'n't of much use. I mistrust if Sary Ann will ever 'arn her
livin'."
Anxious as I was to get to my class this evening, I could not neglect my
little friend; so, going hurriedly to her, I said, as I bent over the
head which at every breath of sleep waved like a pale golden flower on
its stalk,--
"Good night, Annie. To-morrow evening I'll be home earlier, and then we
can have our lesson together."
And she, quite satisfied, held up her face for a kiss, and rose to leave
the room.
"Your supper is a-warmin' in the stove, Sandy," said Mrs. Bray; but I
did not wait either to eat it or to chat with her about the stranger
whose horse I had shod, and who interested her because she thought he
might have given "Amos" extra pay. Reminding her of my lesson, I pushed
up the rickety stairs to my attic, and began as quickly as possible to
make those preparations for meeting the teacher which the young men of
the class, impelled by a rude kind of gallantry, never failed to
observe, and which they described by the expressive term of "smartenin'
up."