His terrible deprivation, of many years standing, was some-thing like a solitary confinement in its cruel effects on him. Most tender-hearted of men, he had not for very long heard an affectionate voice--for I do not think affection travels on a screaming shout, and it was in a screaming shout that even his wife and daughters had to speak to him. Of course, he by no means kept pace with the affairs of the day, nor could any new ideas about his work be conveyed to him. What he had learnt in his village boyhood he knew, and there it stopped.
For instance, passing a "male fern" in my garden, he turned to me solemnly to ask "Snake vairn?" using the old Surrey country talk, and so throughout. He rarely got a new idea. In his later years--during the Boer War -- the nearest he could get to the name of Kruger was "Kroozer--or some sech name." Though he lived for years in a Farnham alley, he failed to pick up any of the manner even of a little country town. He was all rustic. In hot weather he went slouching through the streets (he had a "wound" in his leg) like a harvester, coat over shoulder, shirt unbuttoned, short black pipe in mouth. At his work, with his leather "apern," he was still a village man. I heard weird country superstitions from him about horse-shoeing. A faulty nail, which had had to be withdrawn from a hoof, needed to be kept bright (in his pocket was the best place), lest, going rusty, it should magically injure the horse's hoof. What he didn't know about strakes and strake-nails was not worth knowing; or about harrow-tines, or ironing-up wooden hames, or clouts for wooden axles--all of them rustic things.
Certainly he was of the remote country--buried under old-world notions--a follower of the crafts of Anglo-Saxon colonists before the Conquest. Frensham ("Fruns'm") was his birth-place, hard by Churt ("Cheert," as he called it) in the Surrey wilds, below Hindhead. His father had been a husband man in that village, had fallen down dead while crossing the meadows there--and that, Will thought, foretold what his own ending would be. In the same cottage where he had been born his mother kept the home together for his brother--now another husbandman, as deaf as Will himself. Several times I saw the mother--a black- haired and very handsome woman even at that age; and several times I heard of the grape-vine on the cottage walls. But the only wine I ever knew Will produce was "elder-wine," though I think he sometimes spoke of "pa'snip-wine."
He probably helped on the land until he was sixteen years old. At that age he was apprenticed in my grandfather's Frensham shop--managed in those days by my father's brother Richard. For him Will seems to have conceived a strong liking, as I realised long afterwards. On his death-bed, wandering in his wits, the deaf old man spoke to me under the impression that I was my own uncle, spoke friendly and happily, as if at some long-ago village festival. To my own father he looked up with something like veneration. Once (I was looking him up in his cottage in the alley) he narrated to me at great length how "the only row" he "ever had with 'n" was when my father--already failing for his last illness-- insisted on "striking" at the anvil, to help Will making strake-nails. Will, seeing him distressed, urged him, as master, to take an easier place, namely at the bellows. But my father would none of it; answered only with masterful reproof. When at last he went away, the job being done, Will said sorrowfully to the other blacksmith, "There's our guv'nor bin and done for his-self."
There is reason to surmise that he had a taste for ritual, for ceremony--as so lofty- souled a man might well have. A sort of air-- "swank" if you like--which he sometimes put into his hammering gives good ground for that surmise. He would frown, look important, take pains to show that he was being a good smith. To be sure, I used to regard this ostentation as a sort of sign-language, because talk was of so little use to him. But if so, it was in part a sign of his own feelings in need of dignified expression. The consciousness that this was so saved me from thinking the over-acting quite absurd. He could hammer with a silly air of importance and yet not look silly-- only rather tragic. For did it not all mean that the man was very lonely, very hungry for that fellowship he would have found in ceremony if his infirmity had not shut him out from all ceremony?
From all--or all but all. One hour in the year there was when he could let himself go, and he did it with a gusto. It was on Christmas Eve. Whatever the day of the week it was the custom in my shop-- perhaps my grandfather had introduced it here, perhaps my father--to have "a bit of a clear up" before shutting-up at sunset for Christmas. The woodmen scraped together their shavings, the yard was made tidy, and Will Hammond especially spread himself at sprinkling and sweeping he smithy. He was an unprofitably long time at the task, but y four o'clock, when the bell rang, his old shop was neat, orderly spick-and-span, as if ready for the Prince of Peace himself to look in during the coming holiday. What Will thought about it all I do not know; yet if looks go for anything--if there was any meaning in the happy chirp of his voice when we wished each other " A Merry Christmas"--he was feeling very blissful. Charles Dickens would have beheld him with great affection and esteem.