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CHAPTER II.
“Blithe Natty,” the Harmonious Blacksmith.

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“Under a spreading chestnut tree

The village smithy stands;

The smith, a mighty man is he,

With large and sinewy hands;

And the muscles of his brawny arms

Are strong as iron bands.

His hair is crisp, and black, and long,

His face is like the tan;

His brow is wet with honest sweat,

He earns whate’er he can;

And looks the whole world in the face.

For he owes not any man.”

Longfellow.

NEARLY at the eastern end of Nestleton stood the village forge, a spacious low-roofed building, in which Nathan Blyth, the blacksmith, and his father before him, had wielded the hammer by the ringing anvil, fashioning horse-shoes, forging plough-shares, and otherwise following the arts and mysteries of their grimy craft. Close to the smithy stood Nathan’s cottage, though that is almost too humble a name to give to the neat and roomy dwelling which owned the stalwart blacksmith for its lord and master. True it was thatched and white-washed like its humbler neighbours, but it boasted of two good stories, and had a latticed porch, which, as well as the walls, was covered with roses, jasmine, and other floral adornments. At the gable end was a tall and fruitful jargonelle pear-tree, which not only reached to the very peak of the gable, but like Joseph’s vine, its branches ran over the wall, and were neatly tacked with loops of cloth behind the house, and almost as far as the lowlier porch which screened the kitchen entrance thereto. Both “fore and aft,” as the sailors say, was a spacious and well-managed garden, whose fruits, flowers, and vegetables, trim walks and tasteful beds, testified to the fact that their owner was as skilful with the spade and the rake as he was with the hammer, the chisel, and the file.

And that is saying much, for Nathan Blyth had a wonderful repute as the deftest master of his handicraft within twenty miles of Waverdale. You could not find his equal in the matter of coulters and plough-shares. Farmer Houston used to say that his horses went faster and showed better mettle for his magic fit in the way of shoes; and as for millers’ chisels, with which the millstones are roughened to make them “bite,” they were sent to him from thirty miles the other side of Kesterton market town to be tempered and sharpened as only Nathan Blyth could. Then, too, he was handy in all things belonging to the whitesmith’s trade. He could doctor the smallest locks, and understood the secrets of every kind of catch and latch; the farm-lads of the village would even bring their big turnip watches to him, and the way in which he could fix a mainspring or put to rights a balance-wheel was wonderful to see.

Natty Blyth was a fine specimen of humanity from a physical point of view. He stood five feet eleven in his stockings, and at five-and-forty years of age had thews and sinews of Samsonian calibre and power. A bright, honest, open face, had Nathan; a pair of thick eye-brows, well arched, surmounted by a bold, high forehead, and quite a wealth of dark brown hair. His happy temper, his merry face, and his constant habit of singing at his toil, had got him the name of “Blithe Natty,” and justly so, for a blither soul than he you could not find from John-o’-Groats to Land’s End, with the Orkneys and the Scilly Isles to increase your chances. Whenever he stood by his smithy hearth, his clear tenor voice would roll out its mirthful minstrelsy, while the hot iron flung out its sparks beneath his hammer, defying the ring of the anvil either to drown his voice or spoil his tune.

One fine spring morning, Blithe Natty was busy at his work, and, as usual, his voice and his anvil were keeping time, when old Kasper Crabtree, a miserly old bachelor, who farmed Kesterton Grange, stole on him unobserved. Natty was singing away—

There never was a man.

Since first the world began,

If he only did his duty, and kept his conscience clear,

But God was on his side;

It cannot be denied,

So, whatever may betide,

We’ll do our honest duty, boys, and never, never fear.

Then as you go along,

Ring out a merry song;

A good heart and a true is better far than gear.

In every time and place,

He wears a smiling face,

Who goes to God for grace.

Who does his honest duty, boys, need never, never fear.

“Aye, that’s right,” said Kasper Crabtree. “Honest duty, as you say, is the right sort of thing. I only wish my lazy fellows did a little more on ’t.”

“A little more” was Kasper Crabtree’s creed in a word.

“Why, you see,” said Blithe Natty, “its often ‘like master like man’; pipe i’t parlour, dance i’t kitchen; an’ maybe if you were to do your duty to them a little better they would do better by you. ‘Give a pint an’ gain a peck; give a noggin’ an’ get nowt.’”

Kasper Crabtree did not relish this salutary home-thrust, and made haste to change the subject.

“What a glorious morning it is!” said he, “it’s grand weather for t’ young corn.”

“Aye,” said Natty, “I passed by your forty-acre field yesterday, and your wheat looked splendid. The rows of bright fresh green looked very bonny, and the soil was as clean as a new pin.”

“Hey, hey,” said old Crabtree, for he was proud of his farming, and boasted that his management was without equal in the Riding, “I’ll warrant there isn’t much in the way of weeds, though it’s a parlous job to keep ’em under. It beats me to know why weeds should grow so much faster than corn, and so much more plentiful.”

“Why, you see, Farmer Crabtree, weeds are nat’ral. The soil is their mother, an’ you know it’s only stepmother to the corn, or you wouldn’t have to sow it; and stepmothers’ bairns don’t often thrive well. However, I’m pretty sure that you are a match for all the weeds that grow—in the fields, at any rate.”

“Hey, or anywhere else,” said the boastful farmer.

“Why, I don’t know so much about that,” said Natty. “There’s a pesky lot o’ rubbish i’ the heart, Maister Crabtree, an’ like wicks an’ couch grass there’s no getting to the bottom on em. The love of money, now, is the root of”——

But Kasper Crabtree was off like a shot, for Blithe Natty’s metaphor was coming uncomfortably close to a personal application, and his hearer knew of old that Nathan was in the habit of striking as hard with his tongue as he did with his hammer, so he rapidly beat a retreat. Natty’s face broadened into a smile as he pulled amain at the handle of his bellows, and then drawing from the fire the red-hot coulter he was shaping, he began thumping away amid a shower of fiery spray, singing, as his wont was—

Put in the ploughshare and turn up the soil;

Harrow the seed in and sing at the toil,

Hoe up the ketlocks and pull up the weeds;

Toiling and hoping till harvest succeeds.

Hearts are like fallow, and need to be tilled;

Nothing but evil things else will they yield.

Plough them well, sow them well; crops of good deeds

Follow, if only we keep down the weeds.

Keep down the weeds, brothers, keep down the weeds!

God sends His sunshine, and harvest succeeds.

The coulter was again thrust into the fire, and once again the long lever of the blacksmith’s bellows, with a cow’s horn by way of handle, was gripped to raise another “heat,” when a second visitor crossed the smithy threshold, as different from the grim, gaunt, wrinkled and forbidding form and features of old Kasper Crabtree as a briar-rose differs from a hedgestake, an icicle from a sunbeam, or a polar bear from a summer fawn.

Gathering her skirts of neat-patterned printed calico around her to keep them from the surrounding grime, the new-comer stole noiselessly behind the unconscious smith, laid her dainty hands on his brawny shoulders, and springing high enough to catch a kiss from his swarthy cheek, landed again on terra firma, and, with a ripple of laughter which sounded like a strain of music, stood with merry, upturned face to greet Blithe Natty’s startled gaze.

“Give me that back again, you unconscionable thief!” said Nathan, laying his big hand on her dainty little wrist. “It’s flat felony, and I’ll prosecute you with the utmost rigour of the law.”

“Can’t do it, sir. You’ve no witnesses, and the offence isn’t actionable;” and the doughty little damsel took another from the same place with impunity.

There was a wondrous light in the eyes of Nathan Blyth, as he looked in the fair face of the beautiful girl, the light of a love surpassing the love of women, for was she not his only child, and the very image of the wife and mother, now a saint in heaven, and still loved by him with a tender fidelity that seemed to deepen and strengthen with the lapse of time? No deeper, truer, more concentrated affection ever glowed in the breast of man, than that which filled the heart of Nathan Blyth for his peerless Lucy, and sure I am that none was ever more richly merited.