Best of all he liked the "shop," where the blacksmith work for the farm was done and the sharpening of tools. When the weather was bad outside his father or one of the men lighted the charcoal in the forge and Henry might pull the bellows till the fire glowed and the iron buried in it shone white-hot. Then the sparks flew from the anvil while the great hammer clanged on the metal, shaping it, and Henry begged to be allowed to try it himself, just once. In time he was given a small hammer of his own. So the years passed until Henry was 11 years old, and then a momentous event occurred--small enough in itself, but to this day one of the keenest memories of his childhood. CHAPTER II MENDING A WATCH This first memorable event of Henry Ford's childhood occurred on a Sunday in the spring of his eleventh year. In that well-regulated household Sunday, as a matter of course, was a day of stiffly starched, dressed-up propriety for the children, and of custom-enforced idleness for the elders. In the morning the fat driving horses, brushed till their glossy coats shone in the sun, were hitched to the two-seated carriage, and the family drove to church. William and Mary Ford were Episcopalians, and Henry was reared in that faith, although both then and later he showed little enthusiasm for church-going. Sitting through the long service in the stuffy little church, uncomfortably conscious of his Sunday-best garments, sternly forbidden to "fidget," while outside were all the sights and sounds of a country spring must have seemed a wanton waste of time to small Henry. To this day he has not greatly changed that opinion. "Religion, like everything else, is a thing that should be kept working," he says. "I see no use in spending a great deal of time learning about heaven and hell. In my opinion, a man makes his own heaven and hell and carries it around with him. Both of them are states of mind." On this particular Sunday morning Henry was more than usually rebellious. It was the first week he had been allowed to leave off his shoes and stockings for the summer, and Henry had all a country boy's ardor for "going barefoot." To cramp his joyously liberated toes again into stuffy, leather shoes seemed to him an outrage. He resented his white collar, too, and the immaculate little suit his mother cautioned him to keep clean. He was not sullen about it. He merely remarked frankly that he hated their old Sunday, anyhow, and wished never to see another. Mother and father and the four children set out for church as usual. At the hitching posts, where William Ford tied the horses before going in to the church, they met their neighbors, the Bennetts. Will Bennett, a youngster about Henry's age, hailed him from the other carriage. "Hi, Hen! C'm'ere! I got something you ain't got!"