A waggon, broken down and upheld by a pole in lieu of one of the wheels, stood in front of the blacksmith's shop, and was evidently the reason of Gid Fletcher's industry at this late hour.
Its owner loitered aimlessly about; now looking, with a gloat of acquisition, at his purchases stowed away in the waggon, and now nervously at a little barefoot girl whom he had brought with him to behold the metropolitan glories of the Settlement.
He occasionally asked her anxious questions.
'Ain't you-uns 'most tired out, Euraliny?' he would say; or, 'Don't ye feel wore in yer backbone, hevin' ter wait so long?' or, 'Hedn't ye better lay down on the blanket in the waggin an' rest yer bones, bein' ez we-uns started 'fore daybreak?'
But the sturdy Euralina shook her sun-bonnet, with her head in it, in emphatic negation at every suggestion, and sat upright on the board laid across the rough, springless waggon, looking about her gravely, with a stalwart determination to see all there was in the famed Settlement; thinking, perhaps, that her backbone would have leisure to humour its ails in the retirement of home. What an ideal traveller Euralina would be under a wider propitiousness of circumstance!
And so the anxious parent could only stroll about as before, and contemplate his purchases, and pause at the door of the blacksmith's shop to say, 'Ain't you-uns 'most done, Gid?' in a tone of harrowing insistence, for the fortieth time since the blacksmith's services were invoked.
Gid Fletcher looked up with lowering brow as Micajah Green entered.
The shadows of evening were dense in the ill-lighted place; the fluctuations of the forge fire, now flaring, now fading, intensified the idea of gloom.
The red-hot iron that the blacksmith held on the anvil threw its lurid reflection into his swarthy face and his eyes; his throat was bare; his athletic figure, girded with his leather apron, demonstrated in its poses the picturesqueness of the simple craft; his sleeve was rolled tightly from his huge, corded hammer-arm. His hand-hammer seemed endowed with some nice discriminating sense as it tapped here and there with an imperative clink, and the great sledge in the striker's hands came crashing down to execute its sharp behests, while the flakes flew from the metal in jets of golden sparks.
A man is never so plastic to virtuous impulses as when he is doing well his chosen work. Labour was ordained to humanity as a curse; surely God repented Him of the evil. What blessing has proved so beneficent!