“What do you suppose Deacon Drowne will have hidden under his work bench to-day?” Samuel would ask.
“Oh, I do not know. I am curious to see. Is he not a person of great skill and many surprises?” Abigail would reply.
It was quite true. The old coppersmith saw possibilities in his craft that would have amazed his patrons who thought that the Deacon’s mind was bent all day long on patches and wires. When his day’s work was over the old coppersmith closed his shutter and lighted a candle. He lighted, too, a small stove in which he could heat his metals and weld them into queer and curious shapes. It seemed to him that the sheets of copper and brass in which he worked were too beautiful for the commonplace uses to which he had to put them.
His mind went back to the days of his boyhood in England when he lived on a farm near the sea and could watch the ships beyond the fields where the sea lay, blue and clear. As these thoughts came to him, he welded his metals to make the figures that his memory painted for him. No wonder the children were excited at what the coppersmith would show them that he had made over night!
He would beckon to them to cross his threshold. Then, with his eyes twinkling like stars through his spectacles, he would hold up in triumph something that he had made. Once it was a little brass rooster, shining and beautiful from his comb to the last tail feather. Once the Deacon showed the children a curious little admiral made of copper and holding a telescope as he looked far off at an imaginary sea. Then, to please them, he made a small Indian of copper; the figure was complete even to the feathers in his headdress.
How the children did laugh, though, when Deacon Drowne showed them a copper grasshopper that he had welded! It was so much larger than a real grasshopper that it looked like some strange dragon. It quite filled the tiny shop, its long slender legs stretching in every direction.
“Why did you make it?” the children asked.
The old coppersmith chuckled as he replied.
“To show what can be done with my shining metal,” he said proudly. “It took skill to bend those legs and make the veins in a grasshopper’s wings.”
“What will you do with it, Deacon Drowne?” asked the children.