The Master Blacksmith
A gentleman once envied a blacksmith: "You live and live, waiting for the harvest to come and money to arrive, but the blacksmith just taps with his hammer—and there’s the money. I’ll start a forge too!"So the gentleman set up a forge and ordered his servant to work the bellows. He stood there, waiting for customers. A peasant rode by, wanting to order tires for all four wheels of his cart.
"Hey, stop! Come over here!" the gentleman shouted. The peasant rode up.
"What do you need?"
"Well, sir, I need tires for the whole cart."
"Alright, just wait a moment!"
"How much will it cost?"
"Well, it should be a hundred and fifty rubles, but to attract customers, I’ll take just a hundred."
"Alright."
The gentleman started to stoke the fire, and the servant worked the bellows. The gentleman took the iron and began to forge it, but he didn’t know how—he hammered and hammered until he burned the iron.
"Well," he said, "peasant, you won’t get the whole cart done, maybe just one tire."
"One tire is fine," agreed the peasant. The gentleman hammered some more and said:
"Peasant, you won’t even get one tire, but maybe a small plowshare."
"Alright, even a small plowshare will do," replied the peasant. The gentleman tapped with his hammer, ruined even more iron, and said:
"Well, peasant, you won’t even get a plowshare, but maybe a small awl."
"Fine, even an awl!"
But the gentleman didn’t even have enough iron left for that—he burned it all.
"Well, peasant," said the gentleman, "you won’t even get an awl!"
All the gentleman had left was a "pfft": he dipped the last piece of red-hot iron into water, and it hissed—"pfft!"
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