With a louder sob Lizzie let go her hold and tottered back into a chair, laughing hysterically.  The Bryanite leaned against the table, panting.

There was a long pause.  Mrs. Joll took a napkin from the dresser and fell to fanning the girl’s face, then to slapping it briskly.  “Get up and lay the table,” she commanded; “the preacher’ll stay to supper.”

“Thank ’ee, ma’am, I don’t care if I do,” said he; and ten minutes later they were all seated at supper and discussing the fall in wheat in the most matter-of-fact voices.  Only their faces twitched now and again.

“I hear you had the preacher down to Joll’s last night,” said Mendarva the Smith.  “What’st think of en?”

“I can’t make him out,” was Taffy’s colourless but truthful answer.

“He’s a bellows of a man.  I do hear he’s heating up th’ old Squire Moyle’s soul to knack an angel out of en.  He’ll find that a job and a half.  You mark my words, there’ll be Dover over in your parish one o’ these days.”

During work-hours Mendarva bestowed most of his talk on Taffy.  The Dane seldom opened his lips except to join in the anvil chorus—­

“Here goes one—­
Sing, sing, Johnny! 
Here goes two—­
Sing, Johnny, sing! 
Whack’n till he’s red,
Whack’n till he’s dead,
And whop! goes the widow with
A brand new ring!”

And when the boy took a hammer and joined in he fell silent.  Taffy soon observed that a singular friendship knit these two men, who were both unmarried.  Mendarva had been a famous wrestler in his day, and his great ambition now was to train the other to win the County belt.  Often after work the pair would try a hitch together on the triangle of turf, with Taffy for stickler, Mendarva illustrating and explaining, the Dane nodding seriously whenever he understood, but never answering a word.  Afterwards the boy recalled these bouts very vividly—­the clear evening sky, the shoulders of the two big men shining against the level sun as they gripped and swayed, their long shadows on the grass under which (as he remembered) the poor self-murdered woman lay buried.

He thought of her at night, sometimes, as he worked alone at the forge; for Mendarva allowed him the keys and use of the smithy overtime, in consideration of a small payment for coal.  And then he blew his fire and hammered, with a couple of candles on the bench and a Homer between them; and beat the long hexameters into his memory.  The incongruity of it never struck him.  He was going to be a great man, and somehow this was going to be the way.  These scraps of iron—­these tools of his forging—­were to grow into the arms and shield of Achilles.  In its own time would come the magic moment, the shield find its true circumference and swing to the balance of his arm, proof and complete.

   en d etithei thotamoio mega stheuos okeanoio
   antuga pad pumatev sakeos puka poietoi. . .