The next day I set out after breakfast to inquire about a blacksmith. It
was not every or any blacksmith that would do. I must not fix on the first
to do my work because he was the first. There was one in the village, I
soon learned; but I found him an ordinary man, who, I have no doubt, could
shoe a horse and avoid the quick, but from whom any greater delicacy of
touch was not to be expected. Inquiring further, I heard of a young smith
who had lately settled in a hamlet a couple of miles distant, but still
within the parish. In the afternoon I set out to find him. To my surprise,
he was a pale-faced, thoughtful-looking man, with a huge frame, which
appeared worn rather than naturally thin, and large eyes that looked at the
anvil as if it was the horizon of the world. He had got a horse-shoe in his
tongs when I entered. Notwithstanding the fire that glowed on the hearth,
and the sparks that flew like a nimbus in eruption from about his person,
the place looked very dark to me entering from the glorious blaze of the
almost noontide sun, and felt cool after the deep lane through which I had
come, and which had seemed a very reservoir of sunbeams. I could see the
smith by the glow of his horse-shoe; but all between me and the shoe was
dark.

"Good-morning," I said. "It is a good thing to find a man by his work. I
heard you half a mile off or so, and now I see you, but only by the glow of
your work. It is a grand thing to work in fire."

He lifted his hammered hand to his forehead courteously, and as lightly as
if the hammer had been the butt-end of a whip.

"I don't know if you would say the same if you had to work at it in weather
like this," he answered.