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built the cot; and where his host had himself slept there was no sign.

The smith now stood in the door. “Na, na,” he was saying, “’t is pitch an’ pay—siller or nought. For the ance ye hae very foully deceived me. Ye shall henceforth hae my wark for siller; or, an ye like—”

A volley of rough laughter came booming into the smithy, and then a clatter of hoofs as the man without rode away; but the face of the smith was hot as flame when he turned to the forge, and, as he thrust his fingers through his red beard, an angry light was in his eyes. Reaching for the handle of the bellows, he blew the fire so fiercely that the rockstaff and the whole frame swayed and creaked. He then took up a bar of metal and, breaking it on the anvil with a great blow of the up-hand sledge, studied the grey surface and smiled. He thrust the bar into the white coals and with the slicer he clapped the coals about it.

Now drawing out the bar a little way to see how it was taking its heat, and now thrusting it quickly back again, he brought it to the colour of white flame, and, snatching it out with his pliers and laying it on the face of the anvil, he shaped it with blow after blow of the hand hammer, thrust it again into the coals and blew up the fire, again laid it on the anvil, and, smiting it until the sparks flew in showers, worked it, with a deftness marvellous in the eyes of the lad, who sat agape at the fury of his strokes, into the shape of a dagger or dirk.

At last, heating it in the coals to the redness of blood and throwing it on the floor to cool, he paced the smithy, muttering to himself. After a time he took it up again and with the files in their order—the rough, the bastard, the fine and the smooth—worked it down, now