“Men jynes in things sometimes as they don’t like, my lad. Look here,” he said, holding a glowing piece of steel upon his anvil and giving it a tremendous thump. “See that? I give that bit o’ steel a crack, and it was a bad un, but I can’t take that back, can I?”
“No, of course not, but you can hammer the steel into shape again.”
“That’s what some on us is trying to do, my lad, and best thing towards doing it is holding one’s tongue.”
That spring my father and mother came down, and that autumn I left Arrowfield and went to an engineering school for four years, after which I went out with a celebrated engineer who was going to build some iron railway bridges over one of the great Indian rivers.
I was out there four years more, and it was with no little pleasure that I returned to the old country, and went down home, to find things very little changed.
Of course my uncles were eight years older, but it was singular how slightly they were altered. The alteration was somewhere else.
“By the way, Cob,” said Uncle Dick, “I thought we wouldn’t write about it at the time, and then it was forgotten; but just now, seeing you again, all the old struggles came back. You remember the night of the fire?”
“Is it likely I could forget it?” I said.
“No, not very. But you remember going down to the works and finding no watchman—no dog.”
“What! Did you find out what became of poor old Jupiter?”