Gaunt’s booth was two planks laid across two barrels, with a sheet of tin nailed over the top for a roof and a board hung from its pole in letters too large for the board. MENDED. NOT PRETTY. The board said nothing about prices. Gaunt did not believe a price should be written where anyone could read it before he had had the chance to insult them.
By the first bell of the sixteenth day he had three customers and had insulted all three of them. The first was a Lowgate lodger with a spade whose blade had been bent into a shallow curve by a stone the size of a loaf, and who wanted it straightened for the price of a copper.
“It is a lament,” said Gaunt, turning the blade over in his good hand. “Look at the curve. That is the sound a man makes when he has been buried in his own garden and wants to be remembered as having dug. I will not sing it.”
“I don’t want it sung,” said the lodger, who was a cooper’s apprentice with cropped hair and no patience. “I want it straight.”
“Then you shall have it straight, because a straight spade is less trouble to me than a grieving one.” Gaunt set the blade across the anvil-stone and struck it four times with a short hammer, exactly and without any sign that he was angry. The curve went out of the steel like water out of a bucket…
