“I reckon I do!”
“You don't say you believe that story, grandfather?”
“I don't say what I believe or what I don't believe. The flamin' iron as I've had to do with, has both kep' me out o' knowledge, an' led me into knowledge! I'll turn the tale over again! You see, lad, when I was a boy, I thought everything my mother said and my father did, old-fashioned, and a bit ignorant-like; but when I was a man, I saw that, if I had started right off from where they set me down, I would ha' been farther ahead. To honour your father an' mother don't mean to stick by their chimbley-corner all your life, but to start from their front door and go foret. I went by the back door, like the fool I was, to get into the front road, and had a long round to make.”
“I shan't do so with my father. He don't read much, but he thinks. He's got a head, my father!”
“There was fathers afore yours, lad! You needn't scorn yer gran'ther for your father!”
“Scorn you, grandfather! God forbid!—or, at least,—”
“You don't see what I'm drivin' at, sonny!—When an old tale comes to me from the far-away time, I don't pitch it into the road, any more'n I would an old key or an old shoe—a horse-shoe, I mean: it was something once, and it may be something again! I hang the one up, and turn the other over. An' if you be strong set on throwin' either away, lad, I misdoubt me you an' me won't blaze together like one flamin' sword!”
Richard held his peace. The old man had already somehow impressed him. If he had not, like his father, bid good-bye to superstition, there was in him a power that was not in his father—a power like that he found in his favourite books.
“Mind what he says, and do what he tells you, and you'll get on splendid!” his mother had said as he came away.
“Don't be afraid of him, but speak up: he'll like you the better for it,” his father had counselled. “I should never have married your mother if I'd been afraid of him.”