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Updated: June 28, 2025
My mother and Cousin Jenny accepted the fiction that the injury had been done with a flint arrowhead that Willie had given me, but when Cousin Robert came home and saw my bound hand and heard the story, he gave me a certain look which sticks in my mind. "Wonderful people, those Indians were!" he observed. "They could make arrowheads as sharp as chisels." I was most uncomfortable....
There were a few tools in a corner of the cellar, a vise, files, a hammer, chisels, etc., that father had brought from Scotland, but no saw excepting a coarse crooked one that was unfit for sawing dry hickory or oak. So I made a fine-tooth saw suitable for my work out of a strip of steel that had formed part of an old-fashioned corset, that cut the hardest wood smoothly.
In a few weeks the whites had bartered away nearly all the axes, chisels, hoes, and picks, and what powder, shot, and pikeheads they could steal, in exchange for furs, baskets, young beasts and such like commodities. Though the supply of furs was scanty in Virginia, one master confessed he had got in one voyage by this private trade what he sold in England for thirty pounds.
The extremely large side-pockets, sheltered beneath wide flaps, bulged out convexly whether empty or full; and as he was often engaged to work at buildings far away his breakfasts and dinners being eaten in a strange chimney-corner, by a garden wall, on a heap of stones, or walking along the road he carried in these pockets a small tin canister of butter, a small canister of sugar, a small canister of tea, a paper of salt, and a paper of pepper; the bread, cheese, and meat, forming the substance of his meals, hanging up behind him in his basket among the hammers and chisels.
'The hardest part of my job's done, he announced. 'It's the head end of it that comes hard with me, especially when I'm out of practice. The last time I made one of these, Mrs. Burden, he continued, as he sorted and tried his chisels, 'was for a fellow in the Black Tiger Mine, up above Silverton, Colorado.
Long after, Mr. Jackson used to tell the story of his cousin's first ride to London with great glee, and he always took care to wind up with "but Tam forgot to send me back my breeks!" A common working man, whose sole property consisted in his mallet and chisels, his leathern apron and his industry, might not seem to amount to much in "the great world of London."
Other sportive elephants carry fans and state umbrellas in their trunks; and the marine monsters swimming about the ship that bears the Buddhist missionaries to the isles have such expression and human resemblance as to make one wonder if those pillory an enemy with their chisels, too.
The flowers, the figures of men and animals clinging to the structure of the stairway, are multiplied, step by step, until they crown the tower with a key-stone on which the chisels of the art of the sixteenth century have contended against the naive cutters of images who fifty years earlier had carved the key-stones of Louis XII.'s two stairways.
Take away our books, and give us pictures; shut up our schools and churches, and give us museums and galleries; instead of our looms and forges, substitute chisels and pencils; and farewell to our greatness. The artizan of Birmingham or Glasgow is a more civilised man than the same class in the Italian cities.
It wasn't ore, you remember. It was pure, soft metal you could have melted right down into dollars. The boys cut it out with chisels. If old Elmer hadn't played that trick on me, I'd have been in for about fifty thousand. That was a close call, Spanish." "I recollec'. When the pocket gone, the town go bust." "You bet. Higher'n a kite.
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