other poor people. In the room opposite to hers, on the ground-floor,
lived and worked a shoemaker--a man who had neither wife nor child, nor,
so far as people knew, any near relative at all. He was far from being
in good health, and although he worked from morning to night, had a
constant pain in his back, which was rather crooked, having indeed a
little hump on it. If his temper was not always of the best, I wonder
what cleverest of watches or steam-engines would go as well as he did
with such a twist in its back? To see him seated on his low stool--in
which, by the way, as if it had not been low enough, he sat in a
leather-covered hole, perhaps for the sake of the softness and spring of
the leather--with his head and body bent forward over his lapstone
or his last, and his right hand with the quick broad-headed hammer
hammering up and down on a piece of sole-leather; or with both his hands
now meeting as if for a little friendly chat about something small,
and then suddenly starting asunder as if in astonished anger, with a
portentous hiss, you might have taken him for an automaton moved by
springs, and imitating human actions in a very wonderful manner--so
regular and machine-like were his motions, and so little did he seem to
think about what he was at. A little passing attention, a hint now and
then from his head, was sufficient to keep his hands right, for they
were so used to their work, and had been so well taught by his head,
that they could pretty nearly have made a pair of shoes of themselves;
so that the shoemaking trade is one that admits of a great deal of
thought going on in the head that hangs over the work, like a sun over
the earth ripening its harvest. Shoemakers have distinguished themselves
both in poetry and in prose; and if Hector Macallaster had done so in
neither, he could yet think, and that is what some people who write both
poetry and prose cannot do. But it is of infinitely more importance to
be able to think well than merely to write ever so well; and, besides,
to think well is what everybody ought to be or to become able to do.