To-night it was fogged in the grey smoke of its own wood fires, with here and there on its windows the lemon green of the sky. It smelled faintly of wood-smoke, sweet mud and standing rain, of rot in lathes and tiles. The Horselunges, the cottage where the minister lodged, was the first house in the village after the forge. It stood opposite the Bethel, a brick, eighteenth-century building with big gaunt windows staring blindly over the fields to Puddledock. The Bethel had been built in Georgian days when the Particular Baptists flourished in greater numbers round Sunday Street, and a saint of theirs had built it to “the glory of God and in memory of my dear wife Susannah Odlarne, saved by Grace. For Many are called but Few are chosen.” Mr. Sumption and Tom had walked the last of their way in silence. But the minister’s anger had fizzled out as quickly as it had kindled, and at the door of the forge he held out his hand very kindly to the boy. “Well, good-night to you, lad. I must look in and see Bourner here for a minute or two. I hope your mother won’t be much distressed at your news.” “Reckon she will, but it can’t be helped.... Funny, you doan’t hear the guns down here.” “No more you do, but they’re going it just the same—knocking away little farms.” Tom nodded with a wry smile and walked off. The minister turned into the forge. Mr. Sumption could never pass the forge, and the glow and roar of sparks from its chimney would call him over many a field, from Galleybird or Harebeating, or even from the doors of sick people—if they were not very sick. He was a blacksmith’s son. His father had worked the smithy at the cross-roads by Bethersden in Kent, and Ezra Sumption had grown up in the smell of hoof-parings and the ring of smitten iron. His sketchy education finished, he had taken his place beside his father at the anvil—he had held the meek tasselled hoofs of the farm-horses, he had worked the great bellows that sent the flames roaring up the chimney like Judgment Day, he had swung the heavy smith’s hammer with an arm that in a few years grew lustier than his dad’s, and in time had come to cast as good iron and clap it on as surely as any smith in Kent. But during his adolescence strange things had grown with his bulk and girth. Lonely and Bible-bred, he came to work strange dreams into the roaring furnace and clanging iron. In those sheeting, belching flames he came to see the presage of that day which should burn like an oven, the burning fiery furnace of Shadrach, Meshach and Abed-nego, through which only those could walk unsinged who had with them the Son of God. When he swung the hammer above his head he swung God’s judgment down on the molten iron, shaping out of its fiery torment a form of use. When the horse clumped out of the smithy with the new iron on his hoofs, he felt that there went a soul saved, a child of God passed through fire into service.