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Updated: September 4, 2025
The tinkers clicked their tongues on the roofs of their mouths in a sound of amazement, as much as to say, "What a terrible thing! What a wonderful and a mighty man!" "I advise you to come," persuaded his neighbour. "Never! God is my judge, never!" cried Festus Clasby. Again the tinkers clicked their tongues, looked at each other in wonder.
"I have parted with my inheritance," said Mac-an-Ward. "I have sold my soul and the angels have folded their wings, weeping." "In other words, I have bought a tin can," said Festus Clasby, and his frame and the entire cart shook with his chuckling. The tinker's wife chuckled with him in harmony. Then she reached out her hand with a gesture that claimed a sympathetic examination of the purchase.
Cut clean and clever, soldered at the dawn of day, the dew falling upon the hands that moulded it, the parings scattered about my feet like jewels. And now you would bargain over it. I will not sell it to you at all. I will put it in a holy shrine." Festus Clasby turned the can over in his hands, a little bewildered. "It looks an ordinary can enough," he said.
Festus Clasby had, when taken out of his own peculiar province, a heavy mind, and the type of mind that will range along side-issues and get lost in them if they are raised often enough and long enough.
But as is right, the law is slow, and will wait for a man to come out of his fever. Before it can decide, another man's good name, like a little cloud riding across the sky, is gone from the memory of the people and will not come riding back upon the crest of any wind." "It will be a great price to be paying for a tin can," said Festus Clasby.
Festus Clasby felt puzzled. He was unaccustomed to dealing with people who raised questions of title. His black brows knit. "How can a man who doesn't own a thing sell a thing?" she persisted. "Is it a habit of yours to sell that which you do not own?" "It is not," Festus Clasby said, feeling that an assault had been wantonly made on his integrity as a trader. "No one could ever say that of me.
At the same moment the spare figure of a tinker whose name was Mac-an-Ward, the Son of the Bard, veered around the corner of a street with a new tin can under his arm. It was the Can with the Diamond Notch. Mac-an-Ward approached Festus Clasby, who pulled up his cart.
Pulling himself together he drove with an air about the gable and into the wide open yard at the back, fowls clearing out of his way, a sheep-dog coming to welcome him, a calf mewing mournfully over the half-door of a stable. Festus Clasby was soothed by this homely, this worshipful, environment, and got off the cart with a sigh.
The loaves of bread were under the shawl of the woman who had supported Festus Clasby when he stumbled; the bacon was under another bright shawl; the tobacco and flour fell to the lot of her whose yellow breast showed the play of much sun and many winds; the tea and sugar and the nutmeg and caraway seeds were under the wing of the wife of the Son of the Bard in the Can with the Diamond Notch.
Festus Clasby was endeavouring to deliver his soul of impassioned protests when his neighbour, assisted by a bystander or two, forcibly hoisted him up on his cart and he was driven away amid a great howling from the tinkers. It was twilight when he reached his place among the hills, and the good white letters under the thatch showed clear to his eyes.
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