He would beckon to them to cross his threshold. Then, with his eyes twinkling like stars through his spectacles, he would hold up in triumph something that he had made. Once it was a little brass rooster, shining and beautiful from his comb to the last tail feather. Once the Deacon showed the children a curious little admiral made of copper and holding a telescope as he looked far off at an imaginary sea. Then, to please them, he made a small Indian of copper; the figure was complete even to the feathers in his headdress.
How the children did laugh, though, when Deacon Drowne showed them a copper grasshopper that he had welded! It was so much larger than a real grasshopper that it looked like some strange dragon. It quite filled the tiny shop, its long slender legs stretching in every direction.
“Why did you make it?” the children asked.
The old coppersmith chuckled as he replied.
“To show what can be done with my shining metal,” he said proudly. “It took skill to bend those legs and make the veins in a grasshopper’s wings.”
“What will you do with it, Deacon Drowne?” asked the children.
The old man shook his head.
“Perhaps it has no use,” he said, looking sadly at the copper grasshopper sprawled out before him.
That was what the sober people of Boston thought, too, all except Mr. Peter Faneuil.
No one could quite understand Mr. Peter Faneuil. He had inherited quite a fortune, but he lived in a simple way and was fonder of children and the sea than of wearing fine broadcloth and having a coach. He joined the children one day when they went to Deacon Drowne’s shop and he saw the grasshopper. They had thought that Mr. Peter Faneuil would laugh at it. He did not even smile. He looked at the shining copper wings and the delicate workmanship of the slim legs. Then he grasped the coppersmith’s toil-hardened hand.