“That’s right; but you don’t know yet what I want you to do. You will have to take your coat off sometimes, work hard, put on an apron, and often get dirty.”
“Gardening, uncle? Oh, I shall like that.”
“Yes; gardening sometimes, but in other ways too. I do a deal of tinkering now and then.” Tom stared.
“Yes, I mean it: with tin and solder, and then I try brass and turning. I have a regular workshop, you know, with a small forge and anvil. Can you blow bellows?”
Tom stared a little harder as he gazed in the clear grey eyes and the calm unruffled countenance, in which there was not the dawn of a smile.
“I never tried,” said Tom, “but I feel sure I could.”
“And I feel sure you cannot without learning; some of the easiest-looking things are the hardest, you know. Of course any one can blow forge bellows after a fashion, but it requires some pains to manage the blast aright, and not send the small coal and sparks flying over the place, while the iron is being burned up.”
“Iron burned up?” said Tom.
“To be sure. If I put a piece in the forge, I could manage the supply of oxygen so as to bring it from a cherry heat right up to a white, while possibly at your first trial you would burn a good deal of the iron away.”
“I did not know that,” said Sam.