hands off the tools. The very shape of them, as they lay on the bench or
hung on the wall, seemed to say over and over, "Come, use me; come, use
me." They looked waiting, and hungry for work. They wanted stuff to
shape and fashion into things, and join into other things. They wanted
to make bigger tools than themselves--for ploughing the earth, for
carrying the harvest, or for some one or other of ten thousand services
to be rendered in the house or in the fields. It was impossible for
Willie to see the hollow lip of the gouge, the straight lip of the
chisel, or the same lip fitted with another lip, and so made into the
mouth of the plane, the worm-like auger, or the critical spokeshave,
the hammer which will have it so, or the humble bradawl which is its
pioneer--he could see none of them without longing to send his life into
theirs, and set them doing in the world--for was not this what their
dumb looks seemed ever to implore? At that time young Spelman was busy
making a salt-box for his mother out of the sound bits of an old oak
floor which his father had taken up because it was dry-rotted. It was
hard wood to work, but Willie bore a hand in planing the pieces, and was
initiated into the mysteries of dovetailing and gluing. Before the lid
was put on by the hinges, he carved the initials of the carpenter and
his wife in relief upon it, and many years after they used to show
his work. But the first thing he set about making for himself was a
water-wheel.

If he had been a seaside boy, his first job would have been a boat;
if he had lived in a flat country, it would very likely have been a
windmill; but the most noticeable thing in that neighbourhood was a mill
for grinding corn driven by a water-wheel.

When Willie was a tiny boy, he had gone once with Farmer Thomson's man
and a load of corn to see the mill; and the miller had taken him all