Page:De Amicis - Heart, translation Hapgood, 1922.djvu/171

 us to enter. It was a large room, full of coaldust, bristling with hammers, pincers, bars, and old iron of every description; and in one corner burned a fire in a small furnace, where puffed a pair of bellows worked by a boy. Precossi, the father, was standing near the anvil, and a young man was holding a bar of iron in the fire.

“Ah! here he is,” said the smith, as soon as he caught sight of us, and he lifted his cap, “the nice boy who gives away railway trains! He has come to see me work a little, has he not? I shall be at your service in a moment.”

And as he said it, he smiled; and he no longer had the savage face, the evil eyes of former days. The young man handed him a long bar of iron heated redhot on one end, and the smith placed it on the anvil. He was making one of those curved bars for the rail of terrace balustrades. He raised a large hammer and began to beat the bar, pushing the heated part now here, now there, between one point of the anvil and the middle, and turning it about in various ways; and it was a marvel to see how the iron curved beneath the rapid and accurate blows of the hammer, and twisted, and gradually assumed the graceful form of a leaf torn from a flower, shaped as though it were of dough which he had modelled with his hands. And meanwhile his son watched us with a certain air of pride, as much as to say, “See how my father works!”

“Do you see how it is done, little master?” the blacksmith asked me, when he had finished, holding out the bar, which looked like a bishop's crosier,