sound and whole, laid down in the hall of our house, carriage paid to the door. But the dear house mother, who did not share my memories, did not want it cumbering the hall even when I suggested we might use it as a sort of Chinese gong to call us in the morning and to our meals. We could use a hammer and cover the head with leather, I insinuated. This would make a nice soft murmur. But mother would not hear me. I must get rid of that bell or she would. It was an elephant in the house.

It has been my happy fortune for more than twenty years to take the services and sermons once a year in Sage Chapel at the Cornell University, and, talking that year with President Adams about the training school for smiths' and carpenters' work, the thought flashed on me that I might foist the bell on the university and have it hung over the shops. The good fellow caught the idea with pleasure, though I told him honestly what an evil clamor it made for me all those years ago. "Send it up," he said, "and we will run our risk. It may be the clamor was in the hearing and not in the bell." So it was duly sent, and when I went up the next year he said: "The bell is hung, but has not been rung. We want you to strike the first

sounds. So come right along and ring your bell." I rang it with a touch of tremor, and it seemed to be quite another bell; for it gave forth a pleasant sound. The president was right. The clamor was in my hearing when it would storm me out of what we call my first sleep. I cannot remember any second in those days, only one, and that all too brief.

I think it is Evelyn who says: "Being in Antwerp, I stood in the bell chamber while the bells were ringing, and the noise was full of dissonance and distraction. But the next morning I walked forth from the city when they rang again, and they were full of sweet harmonies." So the enchantment of time and distance, with all the good fortune which had come to me in the many years, had changed the clamor to this pleasant sound; and here ends the tale of my life in the factory.

III

There was one article in our home creed that would admit of no doubt or denial: the boys must learn some craft better than those we were taught in the factory, and this would cost money, because they must find us in clothes through our apprenticeship, when we had no wages. But this made no matter, when the time came for me to leave home sixty-five years ago last August. If I stayed on in the factory, this would be a step down from the rank my father had attained as a smith. So it was ordained by the fireside council, of which I was a member, that I should be a smith too, and the money to clothe me would be found somehow, while my mother would stand true to her colors and her counsel,-" Childer, no matter how poor you be, when you have to do for yourselves, don't look poor and don't tell." The smith who had taught my father was still living, and kept his forge in Ilkley, six miles away over the moor, and he agreed to take me as an ap

prentice. I was then turned fourteen and was bound until I was twenty-one, he giving me house room and food, week day shirts and leathern aprons. So in this way I came to work at the anvil, the utmost limit then and for many a year after of my ambition.

And the change was for the better in many ways. I was homesick for a time, as most boys are, and missed the home safeguards and sanctities; but the work was not so hard as a rule, and the hours were much shorter, for save when we were very busy we did not work more than ten hours a day, and Master Birch kept a good table, rough to be sure, but wholesome and plentiful, so that I began to grow apace and moved an old man to say, when he would step into the forge to warm his hands, "How thou does grow to be sewer: if thaa doesn't stop soin, we sall hev to put a stiddy [anvil] on thee heead." And then he would grin.

And this was not only an ampler life, but a wider world than that in which I was so far raised on the Washburn. So the environment

was finer in many ways. Some readers of these memories may remember the lines of Wordsworth in which he makes a picture true to the life of the

"Yorkshire dales, where warm and low the hamlets lie,

Each with its little plot of sky and little lot of stars."

The dale I left answers well to the picture, as Wharfedale does also in its upper reaches, but begins to open out where the town of Ilkley stands into wider holms and uplands, bound on the south by the "fine brow of crags "the poet Gray saw in a journey through the dale, and mentions this wise in one of his letters. The town also holds a fine historic interest, as I came to learn in the course of time. On this, however, I cannot dwell now, but may ask for room to tell the story, it may be, when these memories come to a close.

And now I will return to note that the spark struck out on the day when I bought the tiny book at prime cost was not as a fire enfolding itself, to be no more seen or heard of. It must have started a fire in my nature which has not yet burned down to white ashes; for, when I had learned to read to some purpose, I see myself in the far-away time and cottage reading, as I may truly say in my case, for dear life. There was a small store of books in our home, and among them Bunyan's "Pilgrim," "Rob