shop.

Joe Wainsworth was upset and thought about the incident all the afternoon.
When farmer-customers came in and stood about to talk of their affairs
he had nothing to say. He was a talkative man and his apprentice, Will
Sellinger, son of the Bidwell house painter, was puzzled by his silence.

When the boy and the man were alone in the shop, it was Joe Wainsworth's
custom to talk of his days as a journeyman workman when he had gone from
place to place working at his trade. If a trace were being stitched or a
bridle fashioned, he told how the thing was done at a shop where he had
worked in the city of Boston and in another shop at Providence, Rhode
Island. Getting a piece of paper he made drawings illustrating the cuts of
leather that were made in the other places and the methods of stitching. He
claimed to have worked out his own method for doing things, and that his
method was better than anything he had seen in all his travels. To the
men who came into the shop to loaf during winter afternoons he presented
a smiling front and talked of their affairs, of the price of cabbage in
Cleveland or the effect of a cold snap on the winter wheat, but alone with
the boy, he talked only of harness making. "I don't say anything about it.
What's the good bragging? Just the same, I could learn something to all the
harness makers I've ever seen, and I've seen the best of them," he declared
emphatically.

During the afternoon, after he had heard of the four factory-made work
harnesses brought into what he had always thought of as a trade that
belonged to him by the rights of a first-class workman, Joe remained silent
for two or three hours. He thought of the words of old Judge Hanby and
the constant talk of the new times now coming. Turning suddenly to his
apprentice, who was puzzled by his long silence and who knew nothing of