Having cracked a joke with the laughing smith, Alec dragged himself
away from the smithy, past the green, and looked in at the stable to
curry-comb the pony and enjoy feeling the little beast's muzzle nosing
in his hand for oats.
He let himself into the manse and ran up to his work-room, where
he began to print off some pages that he had set up on his little
printing press.
At supper his mother looked sadly at her boy with his dancing eyes as
he told her about the wonders of the railway engine. In her heart she
wanted him to be a minister. And she did not see any sign that this
boy would ever become one: this lad of hers who was always running off
from his books to peer into the furnaces of the gas works, or to tease
the village carpenter into letting him plane a board, or to sit, with
chin in hands and elbows on knees, watching the saddler cutting
and padding and stitching his leather, or to creep into the
carding-mill--like the Budge and Toddy whose lives he had read--"to
see weels go wound."
It was a bitter cold night in the Christmas vacation fourteen years
later.[51] Alec Mackay, now a young engineering student, was lost to
all sense of time as he read of the hairbreadth escapes and adventures
told by the African explorer, Stanley, in his book, _How I found
Livingstone_.
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