k and me after we had had
a good sleep, and there was something very pathetic in the way the poor
dog looked at us, as much as to say, "I wish I could speak and put you
on your guard."

But the night passed without any trouble; the men came in to their work,
and with the darkness the fear seemed to have passed away. For there in
the warm sunshine the water of the dam was dancing and sparkling, the
great wheel went round, and inside the works the grindstones were
whizzing and the steel being ground was screeching. Bellows puffed, and
fires roared, and there was the _clink clank_ of hammers sounding
musically upon the anvils, as the men forged blades out of the improved
steel my uncles were trying to perfect.

Business was increasing, and matters went so smoothly during the next
fortnight that our troubles seemed to be at an end. In one week six
fresh men were engaged, and after the sluggish times in London, where
for a couple of years past business had been gradually dying off,
everything seemed to be most encouraging.

Some of the men engaged were queer characters. One was a great swarthy
giant with hardly any face visible for black hair, and to look at he
seemed fit for a bandit, but to talk to he was one of the most gentle
and amiable of men. He was a smith, and when he was at the anvil he
used almost to startle me, he handled a heavy hammer so violently.

I often stood at the door watching him seize a piece of steel with the
tongs, whisk it out of the forge with a flourish that sent the white-hot
scintillations flying through the place, bang it down on the anvil, and
then beat it savagely into the required shape.

Then he would thrust it into the fire again, begin blowing the bellows
with one hand and stroke a kitten that he kept at the works with his
unoccupied hand, talking to it all the time in a little squeaking voice
like a boy's.

He was very fond of swinging the sparkling and sputtering steel about my
head whenever I went in, but he was always civil, and the less I heeded
his queer ways the more civil he became.

There was a grinder, too, taken on at the same time, a short
round-looking man, with plump cheeks, and small eyes which were often
mere slits in his face. He had a little soft nose, too, that looked
like a plump thumb, and moved up and down and to right and left when he
was intent upon his work. He was the best-tempered man in the works,
and seemed to me as if he was always laughing and