Crowded Out o' Crofield; or, The Boy who made his Way

Only a few of the kindly reviewers of the earlier editions of Crowded Out o' Crofield have suggested that it has at all exaggerated the possible career of its boy and girl actors. If any others have silently agreed with them, it may be worth while to say that the pictures of places and the doings of older and younger people are pretty accurately historical. The story and the writing of it were suggested in a conversation with an energetic American boy who was crowded out of his own village into a career which led to something much more surprising than a profitable junior partnership.
W. O. S. NEW YORK, 1893.

I'm going to the city!
He stood in the wide door of the blacksmith-shop, with his hands in his pockets, looking down the street, toward the rickety old bridge over the Cocahutchie. He was a sandy-haired, freckled-faced boy, and if he was really only about fifteen, he was tall for his age. Across the top of the door, over his head, stretched a cracked and faded sign, with a horseshoe painted on one end and a hammer on the other, and the name John Ogden, almost faded out, between them.
The blacksmith-shop was a great, rusty, grimy clutter of work-benches, vises, tools, iron in bars and rods, and all sorts of old iron scraps and things that looked as if they needed making over.
The forge was in the middle, on one side, and near it was hitched a horse, pawing the ground with a hoof that bore a new shoe. On the anvil was a brilliant, yellow-red loop of iron, that was not quite yet a new shoe, and it was sending out bright sparks as a hammer fell upon it— thud, thud, thud, and a clatter. Over the anvil leaned a tall, muscular, dark-haired, grimy man. His face wore a disturbed and anxious look, and it was covered with charcoal dust. There was altogether too much charcoal along the high bridge of his Roman nose and over his jutting eyebrows.
The boy in the door also had some charcoal on his cheeks and forehead, but none upon his nose. His nose was not precisely like the blacksmith's. It was high and Roman half-way down, but just there was a little dent, and the rest of the nose was straight. His complexion, excepting the freckles and charcoal, was chiefly sunburn, down to the neckband of his blue checked shirt. He was a tough, wiry-looking boy, and there was a kind of smiling, self-confident expression in his blue-gray eyes and around his firm mouth.