"The horse likes you," he said, pleasantly, here again as though he shared the feeling.
"Yes," I replied. "Is he in the habit of doing as he did to-night with strangers?"
"He is fastidious, if you know what that means,—as fond of gentlemen as his master," he returned, so pleasantly, that, when I looked up, reddening at the cool assumption of the speech, blacksmith's apprentice though I was, my eye fell beneath the amused glance of his.
"I'm not a gentleman," I said, after a pause,—a little resentfully, I fear; "but I'm not a clown, like my master."
"No, that one can see at a glance," he replied. "You may be a gentleman for aught I see to the contrary; but it requires a great deal to make one.—What school was that the blacksmith spoke of?"
"It is a village class kept by a young lady who rides over from the hillside twice a week to teach us poor fellows something. I'm learning to draw," I added,—the frankness coaxed out of me by a sympathy implied rather than expressed.
"And you are sorry enough to lose any of this lesson," he said, kindly, as I put the horse's foot, firmly shod, upon the ground. "There is the regular pay which goes to the smith, I suppose; and here is a ten-dollar bill for you, if you have the sense to take it. I don't know what kind of a youth you may be; but you have a good head and face, and evidently are superior to the people about you. You don't feel obliged to use their language or lead their life because you are thrown with them, I suppose; but neither are you obliged to leave this work because you are better than the man who calls himself your master. Learn all you can and get a smithy of your own. A good blacksmith is as respectable as a good artist," he said, looking at me keenly, as he mounted his horse, and then rode rapidly through the village street.
CHAPTER II.
I was no proud-spirited hero to work my way independently in the world, but a poor blacksmith's apprentice, glad of every penny honestly earned or kindly given; so I handled my bill over and over again with real pleasure. Amos Bray, my master, was about as well to do as any man in the village, its doctor excepted; but I doubted if Amos ever had a ten-dollar bill over and above the quarter's expenses to spend as he liked.
The smithy often glowed with the double fire of its forge and my fancy. I walked about with a picture-gallery in my brain, and was usually led into its rather meagre display whenever the past was recalled or the future portrayed. The smithy hung there, in warmth and brightness, a genuine Rembrandt of light and shadow, filled with many an odd, picturesque group on winter evenings, or just at twilight, when the fire had died away to its embers. My master had gone home, and work was over; the village children in gay woollen garments and with ruddy faces crowded round the door, fringing brightly the canopy of darkness within.