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I have counselled more than one aspirant after literary fame to go back to his tailor's board or his lapstone. I have advised the dilettanti, whose foolish friends praised their verses or their stories, to give up all their deceptive dreams of making a name by their genius, and go to work in the study of a profession which asked only for the diligent use of average; ordinary talents.
Sir, scoff as you may, love is the one sunbeam of poetry that gilds with a softened splendor the hard, bare outline of many a prosaic life. "Work, work, work, from weary chime to chime"; tramp behind the plough, hammer on the lapstone, beat the anvil, drive the plane, "from morn till dewy eve"; but when the dewy eve comes, ah! Hesperus gleams soft and golden over the far-off pinetrees, but
The tannin unites with the gelatine; and thus the hide becomes leather. This process requires several months. Hides are also tanned by the use of chemicals, in what is called "chrome" tanning. This process requires only a few hours, but it is expensive. In earlier times the shoemaker used to go from house to house with his lapstone, waxed end, awl, and other tools.
And how much do you versifiers know of all those arts and sciences you refer to as if you were as familiar with them as a cobbler is with his wax and lapstone? Enough not to make too many mistakes. The best way is to ask some expert before one risks himself very far in illustrations from a branch he does not know much about.
Yet our law-makers are still legislating for conditions that disappeared with the ox-goad, hand loom, lapstone, and sickle, and are continually trying to devise ways and means by which the labor of the country can be kept employed the year round. What doing?
If I had bin him I know I should soon have had the forty-round apple ladder up agen your window to see what you were about." "Anyone else?" cried Waller. "Ay. Old Fatty Gusset, as aforesaid; old cobbler!" "But you haven't dropped a hint, Bunny?" "Dropped a hint! Na-ay! I'd sooner drop his old lapstone on his toe."
You will see, for instance, that extraordinary linguist, the "learned blacksmith," who ought to have been a teacher of languages; and you may have seen lawyers, doctors and clergymen who were better fitted by nature for the anvil or the lapstone. Avoid debt. Young men starting in life should avoid running into debt. There is scarcely anything that drags a person down like debt.
Others will upheave the blacksmith's hammer, or drive the plane over the carpenter's bench, or take the lapstone and the awl and learn the trade of shoemaking. Many will follow the sea, and become bold, rough sea-captains.
For the first time in his life, when he entered the shop, he had an impulse to avert his eyes and not meet his uncle's fully. Ozias had grown old rapidly of late. He sat, with his usual stiff crouch, on his bench and hammered away at a shoe-heel on his lapstone.
Train after train set out for the new Zion with faith that God would drop manna before them. Each train was a little migrating State in itself. And never was the natural readiness of the American pioneer more luminously displayed. At every halt of the wagons a shoemaker would be seen searching for a lapstone; a gunsmith would be mending a rifle, and weavers would be at their wheels or looms.
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