"This is more of a task," I remarked one evening, "than I had imagined."
Harriet, rocking placidly in her arm-chair, was mending a number of pairs of new socks, Poor Harriet! Lacking enough old holes to occupy her energies, she mends holes that may possibly appear. A frugal person!
"Well, David," she said, "I warned you that you could buy a helve cheaper than you could make it."
"So I can buy a book cheaper than I can write it," I responded.
I felt somewhat pleased with my return shot, though I took pains not to show it. I squinted along my hickory stick which was even then beginning to assume, rudely, the outlines of an axe-handle. I had made a prodigious pile of fine white shavings and I was tired, but quite suddenly there came over me a sort of love for that length of wood. I sprung it affectionately over my knee, I rubbed it up and down with my hand, and then I set it in the corner behind the fireplace.
"After all," I said, for I had really been disturbed by Harriet's remark--"after all, power over one thing gives us power over everything. When you mend socks prospectively--into futurity--Harriet, that is an evidence of true greatness."
"Sometimes I think it doesn't pay," remarked Harriet, though she was plainly pleased.
"Pretty good socks," I said, "can be bought for fifteen cents a pair."
Harriet looked at me suspiciously, but I was as sober as the face of nature.
For the next two or three evenings I let the axe-helve stand alone in the corner. I hardly looked at it, though once in a while, when occupied with some other work, I would remember, or rather half remember, that I had a pleasure in store for the evening. The very thought of sharp tools and something, to make with them acts upon the imagination with peculiar zest. So we love to employ the keen edge of the mind upon a knotty and difficult subject.
One evening the Scotch preacher came in. We love him very much, though he sometimes makes us laugh--perhaps, in part, because he makes us laugh. Externally he is a sort of human cocoanut, rough, brown, shaggy, but within he has the true milk of human kindness. Some of his qualities touch greatness. His youth was spent in stony places where strong winds blew; the trees where he grew bore thorns; the soil where he dug was full of roots. But the crop was human love. He possesses that quality, unusual in one bred exclusively in the country, of magnanimity toward the unlike. In the country we are tempted to throw stones at strange hats! But to the Scotch preacher every man in one way seems transparent to the soul. He sees the man himself, not his professions any more than his clothes. And I never knew anyone who had such an abiding disbelief in the wickedness of the human soul. Weakness he sees and comforts; wickedness he cannot see.