What came of Willie’s going to School, 7%

 

or hung on the wall, seemed to say over and over,
“Come, use me; come, use me.” They looked
waiting, and hungry for work. They wanted stuff
to shape and fashion into things, and join into
other things. They wanted to make bigger tools
than themselves—for ploughing the earth, for carry-
ing the harvest, or for some one or other of ten
thousand services to be rendered in the house or in
the fields. It was impossible for Willie to see the
hollow lip of the gouge, the straight lip of the
chisel, or the same lip fitted with another lip, and
so made into the mouth of the plane, the worm-
like auger, or the critical spokeshave, the hammer
which will have it so, or the humble bradawl which
is its pioneer—he could see none of them without
longing to send his life into theirs, and set them
doing in the world—for was not this what their .
dumb looks seemed ever to implore?

At that time young Spelman was busy making
a salt-box for his mother out of the sound bits of
an old oak floor which his father had taken up
because it was dry-rotted. It was hard wood to
work, but Willie bore a hand in planing the pieces,
and was initiated into the mysteries of dovetailing
and gluing. Before the lid was put on by the
hinges, he carved the initials of the carpenter and
his wife in relief upon it, and many years after they
used to show his work. But the first thing he set
about making for himself was a water-wheel.