Then, in spite of Iron’s piteous cries, he kept on pounding and twisting and turning and shaping the helpless metal until at length it was changed into many forms of use and beauty—rings, chains, axes, knives, cups, and curious tools. But it was so soft, after being thus heated and beaten, that the edges of the tools were quickly dulled. Try as he might, the Smith did not know how to give the metal a harder temper.
One day a honeybee strolled that way. It buzzed around the smithy and then lit on a clover blossom by the door.
“O bee,” cried the busy Smith, “you are a cunning little bird, and you know some things better than I know them. Come now and help me temper this soft metal. Bring me a drop of your honey; bring the sweet liquor which you suck from the meadow flower; bring the magic dew of the wildwood. Give me all such things that I may make a mixture to harden Iron.”
The bee answered not—it was too busy with its own affairs. It gathered what honey it could from the blossom, and then flew swiftly away. [[40]]
Under the eaves above the smithy door an idler was sitting—a mischief-making hornet who heard every word that the Smith said.
“I will help him make a mixture,” this wicked insect muttered. “I will help him to give Iron another temper.”
Forthwith he flew to the thorny thickets and the miry bogs and the fever-breeding marshes, to gather what evils he might. Soon he returned with an armload—the poison of spiders, the venom of serpents, the miasmata of swamps, the juice of the deadly nightshade. All these he cast into the tub of water wherein the Smith was vainly trying to temper Iron.
The Smith did not see him, but he heard him buzzing, and supposed it was the honeybee with sweets from the meadow flowers.
“Thank you, pretty little bird,” he said. “Now I hope we shall have a better metal. I hope we shall make edges that will cut and not be dulled so easily.”
Thereupon he drew a bar of the metal, white-hot, from the forge. He held it, hissing and screeching, under the water into which the poisons had been poured. Little thought he of the evil that was there. He [[41]]heard the hornet humming and laughing under the eaves.