and stood before
him.

"Why it's Madame Gervaise!" he exclaimed with a bright look on his face.
"What a pleasant surprise."

But as his comrades appeared to be rather amused, he pushed Etienne
towards his mother and resumed:

"You've come to see the youngster. He behaves himself well, he's
beginning to get some strength in his wrists."

"Well!" she said, "it isn't easy to find your way here. I thought I was
going to the end of the world."

After telling about her journey, she asked why no one in the shop knew
Etienne's name. Goujet laughed and explained to her that everybody
called him "Little Zouzou" because he had his hair cut short like that
of a Zouave. While they were talking together Etienne stopped working
the bellows and the flame of the forge dwindled to a rosy glow amid the
gathering darkness. Touched by the presence of this smiling young woman,
the blacksmith stood gazing at her.

Then, as neither continued speaking, he seemed to recollect and broke
the silence:

"Excuse me, Madame Gervaise, I've something that has to be finished.
You'll stay, won't you? You're not in anybody's way."

She remained. Etienne returned to the bellows. The forge was soon ablaze
again with a cloud of sparks; the more so as the youngster, wanting to
show his mother what he could do, was making the bellows blow a regular
hurricane. Goujet, standing up watching a bar of iron heating, was
waiting with the tongs in his hand. The bright glare illuminated him
without a shadow--sleeves rolled back, shirt neck open, bare arms and
chest. When the bar was at white heat he seized it with the tongs and
cut it with a hammer on the anvil, in pieces of equal length, as though
he had been gently breaking pieces of glass. Then he put the pieces
back into the fire, from which he took them one by one to work them
into shape. He was forging hexagonal rivets. He placed each piece in a
tool-hole of the anvil, bent down the iron that was to form the head,
flattened the six sides and threw the finished rivet still red-hot on
to the black earth, where its bright light gradually died out; and
this with a continuous hammering, wielding in his right hand a hammer
weighing five pounds, completing a detail at every blow, turning and
working the iron with such dexterity that he was able to talk to and
look at those about him. The anvil had a silvery ring. Without a drop of
perspiration, quite at his ease, he struck in a good-natured sort of a
way, not