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"What's your hurry, Bartlett?" asked the whittler. "You can't do anything this afternoon, if you do go home. It's a poor time this to mend a bad day's work. If you stay, he'll stay; won't you, Mr. Yates? Macdonald is going to set tires, and he needs us all to look on and see that he does it right; don't you, Mac?"

"Shiner's a whittler. He's always cutting things in the door frames and buildings, and getting scolded by the folks that own them. He ought to be a carpenter and whittle something worth while. There there are others but I guess I'm planning too much." "Not a bit, my dear. Yet you say nothing of yourself. What would you like to become, Lionel?"

Prosperity at this time had just begun to smile on Hawthorne, and among other extravagances in which he indulged was a boat, bought from Thoreau made by the hands of this expert Yankee whittler.

"I guess I can stand it, if he can," said the whittler from the bench; which was considered fair repartee. "Sit it, you mean," said young Bartlett, laughing with the others at his own joke. "But," said the blacksmith severely, "we're out of shoes, and you'll have to wait till we turn some, that is, if you don't want the old ones reset. Are they good enough?"

And even the mere whittler usually whittles his stick to a point: that is, he is "making" something. His knife, almost before he is aware of what he is doing, follows a pattern invented in his brain on the instant or remembered from other patterns. He gets pleasure from the sheer muscular activity, and from his tactile sense of the bronze or steel as it penetrates the softer wood.

Sandy took this rating with equanimity, and, when the smith's back was turned, he shrugged his shoulders, took a fresh bite of tobacco from the plug which he drew from his hip pocket, winking at the others as he did so. He leisurely followed Macdonald out of the shop, saying in a whisper as he passed the whittler: "I wouldn't rile the old man, if I were you."

Macdonald swore at it fluently, and requested it to stand still, holding the foot as firmly as if it were in his own iron vise, which was fixed to the table near the whittler. With his right hand he held a hot horseshoe, attached to an iron punch that had been driven into one of the nail holes, and this he pressed against the upraised hoof, as though sealing a document with a gigantic seal.

I was brought up on axes, and jack-knives, and sich sort of food, and can cut OR whittle with the best chopper, or the neatest whittler, in or out of New England." "You can try your hand, if you wish it," said Ben, relinquishing the axe. "I can fell a tree as well as yourself, but have no such love for the business as to wish to keep it all to myself."

"You would see that at the first glance, if you were used to riming." "Are you a poet, then, as well as a blacksmith and a bookbinder?" "Too much of a poet, I hope, to imagine myself more than a whittler of reeds!" answered Richard. He was not sorry, however, to let Barbara know him for a poor relation of the high family of poets.

One after another they got down from the fence, the whittler shutting his knife with a reluctant snap, and putting it in his pocket with evident regret. The schoolhouse, large as it was, was filled to its utmost capacity women on one side of the room, and men on the other; although near the door there was no such division, all the occupants of the back benches being men and boys.