CHAPTER IV
ENTER MR. ED SMITH
It is only with difficulty thus far in my narrative that I have kept Norton Carr out of it. When you come to know him you will understand why. He is inseparably bound up with every memory I have of the printing-office. The other day, when I was describing my first visit to the establishment of Doane & Doane, I kept seeing the figure of Nort bending over the gasoline engine. I kept hearing him whistle in the infectious low monotone he had, and when I spoke of the printing press I all but called it "Old Harry" (Nort christened the ancient Hoe press, Old Harry, which every one adopted as being an appropriate name). I even half expected to have him break out in my pages with one of his absurd remarks, when I knew well enough that he had no business to be in the story at all. He hadn't come yet, and Anthy and Fergus and the old Captain were positively the only ones there.
But Nort, however impatient he may be getting, will have to wait even a little while yet, for notable events were to occur in the printing-office just before he arrived, without which, indeed, he never could have arrived at all. If it had not been for the ploughing and harrowing of Ed Smith, painful as it was to that ancient and sedate institution, the Hempfield Star, there never would have been any harvest for Norton Carr, nor for me, nor for Anthy. So good may come even out of evil.
As I narrate these preliminary events, however, you will do well to keep in your thought a picture of Nort going about his pleasures—I fear, at that time, somewhat unsteadily—in the great city, not knowing in the least that chance, assisted by a troublesome organ within called a soul, was soon to deposit him in the open streets of a town he had never heard of in all his life, but which was our own familiar town of Hempfield.
The thought of Nort looking rather mistily down the common—he was standing just in front of the Congregational Church—and asking, "What town am I in, anyhow?" lingers in my memory as one of the amusing things I have known.
Late in June I began to feel distinctly the premonitory rumblings and grumblings of the storm which was now rapidly gathering around the Star. It was a very clever Frenchman, I believe—though not clever enough to make me remember his name—who, upon observing certain disturbances in the farther reaches of the solar system, calculated by sheer mathematical genius that there was an enormous planet, infinitely distant from the sun, which nobody had yet discovered.