It was clear that must be his part in the affair; it could
not be anybody else's, for in that case some one else would have
attended to it. He must see about it.
I think I have said before that Willie knew almost everybody in the
village, and I might have added that everybody without exception knew
him. He was a favourite--first of all, because his father was much loved
and trusted; next, because his mother spoke as kindly to her husband's
poor patients as to the richer ones; and last, because he himself spoke
to everybody with proper respect. Some of the people, however, he knew
of course better than others. Of these Mrs Wilson we know was one. But I
believe I also mentioned that in the house in which she lived there were
other poor people. In the room opposite to hers, on the ground-floor,
lived and worked a shoemaker--a man who had neither wife nor child, nor,
so far as people knew, any near relative at all. He was far from being
in good health, and although he worked from morning to night, had a
constant pain in his back, which was rather crooked, having indeed a
little hump on it. If his temper was not always of the best, I wonder
what cleverest of watches or steam-engines would go as well as he did
with such a twist in its back? To see him seated on his low stool--in
which, by the way, as if it had not been low enough, he sat in a
leather-covered hole, perhaps for the sake of the softness and spring of
the leather--with his head and body bent forward over his lapstone
or his last, and his right hand with the quick broad-headed hammer
hammering up and down on a piece of sole-leather; or with both his hands
now meeting as if for a little friendly chat about something small,
and then suddenly starting asunder as if in astonished anger, with a
portentous hiss, you might have taken him for an automaton moved by
springs, and imitating human actions in a very wonderful manner--so
regular and machine-like were his motions, and so little did he seem to
think about what he was at.
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