"Nathaniel Hawthorne - The Artist of the Beautiful" - читать интересную книгу автора (Hawthorne Nathaniel)

coal-strewn floor, according as the breath of the bellows was puffed
forth, or again inhaled into its vast leathern lungs. In the intervals
of brightness, it was easy to distinguish objects in remote corners of
the shop, and the horse-shoes that hung upon the wall; in the
momentary gloom, the fire seemed to be glimmering amidst the vagueness
of un-enclosed space. Moving about in this red glare and alternate
dusk, was the figure of the blacksmith, well worthy to be viewed in so
picturesque an aspect of light and shade, where the bright blaze
struggled with the black night, as if each would have snatched his
comely strength from the other. Anon, he drew a white-hot bar of
iron from the coals, laid it on the anvil, uplifted his arm of
might, and was seen enveloped in the myriads of sparks which the
strokes of his hammer scattered into the surrounding gloom.

"Now, that is a pleasant sight," said the old watchmaker. "I know
what it is to work in gold, but give me the worker in iron, after
all is said and done. He spends his labor upon a reality. What say
you, daughter Annie?"

"Pray don't speak so loud, father," whispered Annie. "Robert
Danforth will hear you."

"And what if he should hear me?" said Peter Hovenden; "I say again,
it is a good and a wholesome thing to depend upon main strength and
reality, and to earn one's bread with the bare and brawny arm of a
blacksmith. A watchmaker gets his brain puzzled by his wheels within a
wheel, or loses his health or the nicety of his eyesight, as was my
case; and finds himself, at middle age, or a little after, past
labor at his own trade, and fit for nothing else, yet too poor to live
at his ease. So, I say once again, give me main strength for my money.
And then, how it takes the nonsense out of a man! Did you ever hear of
a blacksmith being such a fool as Owen Warland, yonder?"

"Well said, uncle Hovenden!" shouted Robert Danforth, from the
forge, in a full, deep, merry voice, that made the roof reecho. "And
what says Miss Annie to that doctrine? She, I suppose, will think it a
genteeler business to tinker up a lady's watch than to forge a
horse-shoe or make a gridiron!"

Annie drew her father onward, without giving him time for reply.

But we must return to Owen Warland's shop, and spend more
meditation upon his history and character than either Peter
Hovenden, or probably his daughter Annie, or Owen's old school-fellow,
Robert Danforth, would have thought due to so slight a subject. From
the time that his little fingers could grasp a pen-knife, Owen had
been remarkable for a delicate ingenuity, which sometimes produced
pretty shapes in wood, principally figures of flowers and birds, and
sometimes seemed to aim at the hidden mysteries of mechanism. But it
was always for purposes of grace, and never with any mockery of the