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Instead it seems to call to mind the clang of hammers on helmet or anvil, or shield or tool, according to whether it is a time of war or peace and in the Iron Age there was indeed very little of peace that did not look a great deal more like war. In the Forest, many times as far from the land where Umpl lived as one could see from the tallest tree top, there lived a boy a chief's son.
He raised a large hammer and began to beat it, pushing the heated part now here, now there, between one point of the anvil and the middle, and turning it about in various ways; and it was a marvel to see how the iron curved beneath the rapid and accurate blows of the hammer, and twisted, and gradually assumed the graceful form of a leaf torn from a flower, like a pipe of dough which he had modelled with his hands.
We were in the centre of a circus of fire, woven by all the lightnings of the cannonade. To the south-west, however, a black breach opened, and one divined a free passage there towards the interior of the country and towards silence. A few hundred feet from us, a cross-road continually shelled by the enemy echoed to the shock of projectiles battering the ground like hammers on an anvil.
The boy ran to him instantly; the smith took him and set him directly on the anvil, holding him under the arms, and said to him: "Polish off the frontispiece of this big beast of a daddy of yours a little!" And then Precossi covered his father's black face with kisses, until he was all black himself. "That's as it should be," said the smith, and he set him on the ground again.
These did little harm, though the repeated thuds of their discharge, like the rapid strokes of a Nasmyth hammer on its anvil, might have shaken the resolution of any but the steadiest troops, seeing that our field-battery on Maiden's Castle could not for a long time locate the exact hiding-place of those vicious little weapons, and when they did get a chance, the enemy's heavy artillery replied to their fire with a more persistent cannonade than ever.
And then suddenly the Hunter's Moon broke the frail bars of its cloud prison, and was again free to cast its full splendor over the blackness. Under this sudden burst of light, Anvil Rock leapt out of the shadows vague, black, huge, terrible and she uttered a cry startled and relieved at seeing it so near by, when she had thought it much farther off.
To him the secret regret that he had not dared ride into the bushes to scalp the Indian he believed he had shot, and the fact that his hands were straining at the full chords of the ANVIL CHORUS on that very evening, was not even to be considered unusual. Still, certain strains of that classic were always afterward associated in his mind with the shooting of the Indian if he had really shot him.
"I asked the red-hot iron, when it glimmered on the anvil, 'Wherefore glowest thou longer than the firebrand? 'I was born in the dark mine, and the brand in the pleasant greenwood. Kindness fadeth away, but vengeance endureth. "I asked the green oak of the assembly, wherefore its boughs were dry and seared like the horns of the stag? And it showed me that a small worm had gnawed its roots.
"Forgive me if I do not think highly, in general, of Italian honour, or Italian valour; your valour I acknowledge, for I have witnessed it, and valour and honour go together, let that suffice!" As Adrian was about to answer, his eye fell suddenly on the burly form of Cecco del Vecchio, who was leaning his bare and brawny arms over his anvil, and gazing, with a smile, upon the group.
With his leathern apron he wiped the Dane's anvil for a seat, while she hitched up Aide-de-camp and stepped into the glow of the forge-fire. "The hounds took us three miles beyond Carwithiel: and there, just as they lost, Aide-de-camp cast his off-hind shoe. I didn't find it out at first, and now I've had to walk him all the way back. Are you alone here?" "Yes."
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