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"You may try me, if you will. You say you are a fir nan ord. Do you know how to cast a sledge hammer?" "Ay, truly ask the eagle if he can fly over Farragon." "But before you strive with me, you must first try a cast with one of my leichtach. Here, Dunter, stand forth for the honour of Perth! And now, Highlandman, there stands a row of hammers; choose which you will, and let us to the garden."
Dunter, the stout journeyman of the smith, made what was called a prodigious cast; but the Highlander, making a desperate effort, threw beyond it by two or three feet, and looked with an air of triumph to Henry, who again smiled in reply. "Will you mend that?" said the Gael, offering our smith the hammer. "Not with that child's toy," said Henry, "which has scarce weight to fly against the wind.
The eider ducks, or dunter geese, as we call them in Orkney, are always plentiful in the winter time, and valuable not only for their flesh, but also for their rich downy feathers, and I managed to procure a good number of these. Over at the fresh-water loch of Harray, too, several teals and sheldrakes were taken.
"Dunter," he said, "rax me that bar from the furnace"; and uplifting Sampson, as he called the monstrous hammer, he plied the metal with a hundred strokes from right to left now with the right hand, now with the left, now with both, with so much strength at once and dexterity, that he worked off a small but beautifully proportioned horseshoe in half the time that an ordinary smith would have taken for the same purpose, using a more manageable implement.
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