He was a hard-featured, good-looking, white-haired man of sixty, with piercing eyes of quite cerulean blue, and a rough voice with an undertone of music in it. There was music, indeed, all through him. In the roughest part of his history it was his habit to go to church--mainly, I may say entirely, for the organ, but his behaviour was never other than reverent. How much he understood, may be left a question somewhat dependent on how much there may have been to understand; but he had a few ideas in religion which were very much his own, and which, especially some with regard to certain of the lessons from the Old Testament, would have considerably astonished some parsons, and considerably pleased others. He was a big, broad-shouldered man, with the brawniest arms, and eyes so bright and scintillant that one might fancy they caught and kept for their own use the sparks that flew from his hammer. His face was red, with a great but short white beard, suggesting the sun in a clean morning-fog. A rickety omnibus carried Richard from the railway-station some five miles to the smithy. When the old man heard it stop, he threw down his hammer, strode hastily to the door, met his grandson with a gripe that left a black mark and an ache, and catching up his portmanteau, set it down inside. “I'll go with you in a moment, lad!” he said, and seizing with a long pair of pincers the horse-shoe that lay in process on the anvil, he thrust it into the fire, blew a great roaring blast from the bellows, plucked out the shoe glowing white, and fell upon it as if it were a devil. Having thus cowed it a bit, he grew calm, and more deliberately shaped it to an invisible idea. His grandson was delighted with the mingling of determination, intent, and power, with certainty of result, manifest in every blow. In two minutes he had the shoe on the end of a long hooked rod, and was hanging it beside others on a row of nails in a beam. Then he turned and said-- “There, lad! that's off the anvil--and off my mind! Now I'm for you!” “Grandfather,” said Richard, “I shouldn't like to have you for an enemy!” “Why not, you rascal! Do you think I would take unfair advantage of you?” “No, that I don't! But you've got awful arms and hands!” “They've done a job or two in their day, lad!” he answered; “but I'm getting old now! I can't do what I thought nothing of once. Well, no man was made to last for ever--no more than a horse-shoe! There'd be no work for the Maker if he did!” “I'm glad to see we're of one mind, grandfather!” said Richard. “Well, why shouldn't we--if so be we're in the right mind!--Yes; we must be o' one mind if we're o' the right mind! The year or two I may be ahead o' you in gettin' at it, goes for nothing: I started sooner!--But what may be the mind you speak of, sonny?” The look of keen question the old man threw on him, woke a doubt in Richard whether he might not have misunderstood his grandfather.