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A mighty fall from "freedom's lofty heights," but a wonderfully improved machine. The modern hog is to his progenitor as the man with the steam-hammer to the man with the stone-hammer, infinitely more useful, though not so free. It is not easy to overestimate the value of swine to the general farmer; but to the factory farmer they are indispensable.
As I have said, they do not seem to have known the proper way of putting the handle on to a stone-hammer; and, though they used bronze, they had not applied it to making such things as knives and spear-heads. They had no beasts of burden; and, though there were animals in the country which they probably might have domesticated and milked, they had no idea of anything of the kind.
The guards had rallied from their surprise, and sparing the escaped for the sake of the precious shield they bore, turned their fire upon the escaping, cutting them off until the whole corridor below was blocked with wounded, dead and dying. One more man appeared at the clerk's door: he was a powerful fellow with a horse-pistol and a stone-hammer.
I am relating what occurred little more than an hour ago, and I have forgotten nothing of the interview. He, as I said, offers to give me a stone-hammer.
And sure enough a bouncing bull-calf, turning aside from a thick clump of trees, came within about a hundred yards of me apparently wild with fright, and not knowing which way to run. Just as he was turning off again, I fired, and he fell upon his knees, struck in the shoulder. Migo was upon him in an instant, and felled him to the earth with a blow of his stone-hammer.
Tools, like everything else, had small beginnings. With the primitive stone-hammer and chisel very little could be done. The felling of a tree would occupy a workman a month, unless helped by the destructive action of fire.
Light as it was, I heard it fall like a plummet. He swallowed slowly, tilting up the bottle by little and little, and now he looked at me no more. The last few drops of liquor he poured into the palm of his hand, and licked up. Then, with a sudden hurry of violence and swearing horribly, he threw the bottle from him, and stooped; and I saw in his hand a stone-hammer with a long heavy handle.
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