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the shape of her best hat once a fortnight. She had re-trimmed it once and he,
happening to come into the kitchen while she was doing it, had asked what she
thought she was up to. When she said she was trying to make the crown a little lower,
he had offered to take the hat out to the forge and lower the crown with his sledge-
hammer on the anvil, and that episode furnished him with a standing joke which he
repeated every time Laura appeared in anything new. That is a sample of Matthew’s
jokes. He had scores of similar ones which he was constantly repeating with the
intention of amusing her.
Matthew was a small, bent, elderly man with weak blue eyes and sandy
whiskers. No one looking at him would have guessed at his importance in the eyes of
the local farmers and land-owners. He was a farrier as well as a smith, and such a
farrier, it was said, as few neighbourhoods could boast of. Horses, indeed, appeared
to be more to him than human beings; he understood and could cure so many of their
ailments that the veterinary surgeon had seldom to be sent for by the Candleford
Green horse-owners.
A cupboard, known as ‘Matthew’s cupboard’, high up on the kitchen wall,
held the drugs he used. When he unlocked it, bottles of all shapes and sizes could be
seen; big embrocation bottles, stoppered glass jars containing powder or crystals, and
several blue poison bottles, one of which must have held at least a pint and was
labelled ‘Laudanum’. He would hold this last bottle up to the light, shake it gently,
and say: ‘A wineglass of this wouldn’t do some folks I know much harm. Their
headaches and whimseys ‘udn’t trouble them no more, nor other folks neither.’
That was another of Matthew’s jokes. He had no enemies, and, as far as was
known, no intimate friends among his own kind. His affections were reserved for
animals, especially for those he had cured of some sickness or injury. If a cow had a
difficult calving, or a pig went off its food, or an infirm old dog had to be put away,
Matthew was sent for. He had a tame thrush which he had found in the fields with a
broken wing and brought home to treat. He had succeeded to some extent in mending
its wing, but it could still only flutter, not fly, so he bought a round wicker cage for it