I have often reflected upon the incalculable influence of one man upon a community.  The town is better for having stood often looking into the fire of Carlstrom’s forge, and seeing his hammer strike.  I don’t know how many times I have heard men repeat observations gathered in Carlstrom’s shop.  Only the other day I heard the village school teacher say, when I asked him why he always seemed so merry and had so little fault to find with the world.

“Why,” he replied, “as Carlstrom, the smith says, ’when I feel like finding fault I always begin with myself and then I never get any farther,’”

Another of Carlstrom’s sayings is current in the country.

“It’s a good thing,” he says, “when a man knows what he pretends to know.”

The more I circulated among my friends, the more I heard of Carlstrom.  It is odd that I should have gone all these years knowing Carlstrom, and yet never consciously until last week setting him in his rightful place among the men I know.  It makes me wonder what other great souls about me are thus concealing themselves in the guise of familiarity. (This stooped gray neighbour of mine whom I have seen so often working in his field that he has almost become a part of the landscape—­who can tell what heroisms may be locked away from my vision under his old brown hat?)

On Wednesday night Carlstrom was at Dr. McAlway’s house—­with Charles Baxter, my neighbour Horace, and several others.  And I had still another view of him.

I think there is always something that surprises one in finding a familiar figure in a wholly new environment.  I was so accustomed to the Carlstrom of the gunshop that I could not at once reconcile myself to the Carlstrom of Dr. McAlway’s sitting room.  And, indeed, there was a striking change in his appearance.  He came dressed in the quaint black coat which he wears at funerals.  His hair was brushed straight back from his broad, smooth forehead and his mild blue eyes were bright behind an especially shiny pair of steel-bowed spectacles.  He looked more like some old-fashioned college professor than he did like a smith.

The old gunsmith had that pride of humility which is about the best pride in this world.  He was perfectly at home at the Scotch Preacher’s hearth.  Indeed, he radiated a sort of beaming good will; he had a native desire to make everything pleasant.  I did not realize before what a fund of humour the old man had.  The Scotch Preacher rallied him on the number of houses he now owns, and suggested that he ought to get a wife to keep at least one of them for him.  Carlstrom looked around with a twinkle in his eye.

“When I was a poor man,” he said, “and carried boxes from Ketchell’s store to help build my first shop, I used to wish I had a wheelbarrow.  Now I have four.  When I had no house to keep my family in, I used to wish that I had one.  Now I have four.  I have thought sometimes I would like a wife—­but I have not dared to wish for one.”