The young man led his horse into the shade, and came to watch Dickon. As the leaf-curves began to stand out and the nubs of the acorn-cluster took shape he seemed more and more interested. Once he began to ask a question, but stopped himself, as if he knew that when a man has his whole mind on a task he cannot spare any part of it for talk. Dickon almost forgot that he was there. He was intent upon putting exactly the right hollows and veins in the leaf, and giving exactly the right twist to the handle. At last it was done. Dickon straightened his back and looked at it, as the sunlight wavered upon it through the branches. The stranger clapped him on the shoulder. "It is better than the sketch," he cried heartily. "It is good indeed. I have been in London, lad, in the Low Countries and in France, and I never saw a sweeter bit of work. How didst know the true line for that handle?" [Illustration: "'IT IS BETTER THAN THE SKETCH,' HE CRIED HEARTILY"] "That's to make it open properly," Dickon explained, "fits the hand, like." The other nodded approvingly. "I see. I learned that same lesson in my pottery. 'Wilfrid,' my old master used to tell me, 'never thee make too small an ear to thy jugs if thou lik'st the maids to love 'ee.' There's a knack, you see, in making a handle with a good grip to it, that will neither spill the milk nor hinder pouring. My wife she helped me there. She loves good work as well as I do." Adam Smith, coming up the Lewes road next day, could not think what had happened when he saw Dickon in eager talk with a stranger. The boy had never been given to words. He was more taken aback when Master Wilfrid told him that his son had the making of a rare workman. He answered gruffly, stroking his big beard: "Aye, the lad's well enow. Latch done, Dickon? Go and fit it to yon gate." Wilfrid had come back to England full of new ideas, and ambitious above all for the honor of English craftsmen. When he found this youth working out, without any model at all, a thing so good as the oak-leaved gate-latch, he was surer than ever that the land he loved could raise her own smiths. It was his ambition to make his own house beautiful within and without, as were some of the merchants' houses he had seen in cities. He further astonished the old smith by telling him that if Dickon would put some time on work along his own lines, he would pay him double or treble what he would earn at common labor. "You see," explained the potter, as he showed the design he had drafted for a carved oaken chest, "there's much to be thought of in iron-work. You have to make it strong as well as handsome, and what's more, nine times out of ten you have to fit it to the work of some other man. It'd never do for the hinges and handles on this coffer to spoil the looks o' the carving, and that's to be done in London, d' ye see? Belike I'll have you make those first, Dickon, and let Quentin suit his pattern to yours. He can."