The Argosy — page 337: what you’re looking at

Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.

316 Far Normandy. by landing me in a deposit of lime half a yard high. He pretended not to have seen it, but from the periodical bursts of laughter that came from him as he surveyed my deplorable appearance, I doubted the assertion. It was evidently an excellent joke, not at his own expense. It is, however, useless to preach without practising, and I therefore took it philosophically, and pretended to enjoy it also. I confess that if I never felt a hypocrite before, I felt one then. As we went on, the houses grew fewer and further between ; more curious and countrified. One of these was a blacksmith’s forge, and as the worthy smithy brought his brawny arm down upon the anyil, the metal rang out upon the night air and the sparks flew upwards. The flames of the forge played upon his face, whilst a young urchin, black as a chimney sweeper, blew the bellows. The man’s voice kept rhythm to his strokes in one of the songs of the people. He himself looked worthy of Vulcan, and the scene was fitted for Pande- monium. Why are forges always so interesting? - Is it because they are remnants of a barbarous and bygone age—almost the only things that have been in any way handed down to us from a period which seems remote as the Flood, or the Creation, or any other event suff- ciently far off to appear to belong to another state of existence and another world ? 3eyond the forge was a house, small and low; its walls seemed three feet thick, and it appeared to possess just a but and a ben, as they say in Scotland. In the wall there was a hole about two feet square, open to the elements, without window, without other pro- tection than an outside green shutter, which apparently was never closed, so stiff and rude and rusty was the iron that fastened it to its place. Framed as it were by this hole in the wall was an old man sitting on a stool within the but—or the ben: I know not how, in Scotland, they distinguish the one from the other. He was cobbling shoes, this patriarch, and was a direct contrast to the smithy, the sound of | whose voice and anvil had very distinctly followed us. The cobbler — was small and delicate, with pale, refined features. Long white locks — fell over a high brow, and over his stooping shoulders. He might have | been a genius, this mender ef shoes. There was the musical black- | fl j SEN a smith, here the poetical cobbler. The one might compose verses, — the other set them to melody. He looked nearly a hundred, and | probably had seen in a long life the “ weight and woe of his errand ;” | the “much tribulation” all must more or less pass through in | their strange, mysterious earthly pilgrimage. His white locks, and, | above all, a certain resigned expression, which only comes of | long years of care manfully battled with, sufficiently testified to the nature of his past. What his particular cross had been, the face | would not tell. Perhaps a shrew of a wife, who had lived all her | allotted years and beyond them ; perhaps a wife who, the light of his | eyes, the loadstar of his heart, had died young and left him al GEomichbooks.com