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One evening, as he was going home through the Dargle, he sat down on a mossy stone, and fell to thinking of his hard lot, and wondering what Providence had against the O'Dalys, that he had not been made a lord, or at least, a rich squire. All at once, he heard the click, click, of the Clericaune's little hammer on his lapstone!
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.
'Daur to say sic a word in ae breath wi' my grannie, cried Robert, snatching up the lapstone, 'an' I'll brain ye upo' yer ain shop-flure. Sandy threw the knife on his stool, and sat down beside it. Robert dropped the lapstone. Sandy took it up and burst into tears, which before they were half down his face, turned into tar with the blackness of the same.
Why, you silly fellow, the sharpest tool on your bench cannot draw blood from me, and that blackened lapstone, if driven with all the force of your great arm through my seeming substance, would leave me sitting here still, not to mock, but to try and save you." The baffled and stricken shoemaker looked up and muttered. "Then you are not human, you are a demon.
The old man was now dead, having laid down his awl and lapstone just a year before the rise of those international complications which resulted in the appearance of Sergeant O'Neil in Rivermouth, where he immediately tacked up the blazoned aegis of the United States over the doorway of Dame Trippew's little shop.
They even suspected Cobbler Keezar of mischief when he declared that his magic lapstone which Agrippa had torn from the tower at Nettesheim gave him a vision of the time when men would be as glad as nature, when the "snuffler of psalms" would sing for joy, when priests and Quakers would talk together kindly, when pillory and gallows should be gone. Poor Keezar!
The new road from Emu plains, which is still less inclined, has been made during the government of Sir Richard Bourke, and relieves the Bathurst teams from the difficulties of Lapstone hill, the ascent of which cost them a whole day.
Some of his rivals in the trade, becoming jealous of his superior success, conspired together and concocted a plan for his overthrow. One of them procured somewhere an old lapstone, and breaking it into small fragments, selected one as the specimen to be subjected to the intended victim for testing.
To see him seated on his low stool in which, by the way, as if it had not been low enough, he sat in a leather-covered hole, perhaps for the sake of the softness and spring of the leather with his head and body bent forward over his lapstone or his last, and his right hand with the quick broad-headed hammer hammering up and down on a piece of sole-leather; or with both his hands now meeting as if for a little friendly chat about something small, and then suddenly starting asunder as if in astonished anger, with a portentous hiss, you might have taken him for an automaton moved by springs, and imitating human actions in a very wonderful manner so regular and machine-like were his motions, and so little did he seem to think about what he was at.
When the family were gone to school, and her honest man was somewhere at work in the Master's vineyard, she could slip on her bonnet and shawl and just run into the preaching service close by, and gather strength and encouragement from the earnest prayers and humble exhortations of those men whom God had found in the quarry, at the loom, in the mine, or at the lapstone, and sent forth Sunday by Sunday into the villages to preach a homely gospel to the poor, and comfort to His flock.
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