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Updated: May 1, 2025
It is not a very serious misadventure to take a flying header into a bed of loose sand on an American country road; but the prospect of rooting up a flint-stone with one's nose, or knocking a curb-stone loose with one's bump of cautiousness, is an entirely different affair; consequently, the universal smoothness of the surface of the English highways is appreciated at its full value by at least one wheelman whose experience of roads is nothing if not varied.
He went home, and there was the church, all ready except the very top of the weather-cock, and the Troll was just putting the finishing-touch to that. Then St. Olaf called out to him, "Oh! ho! Wind and Weather, you have set the spire crooked!" And then, with a great noise, the Troll fell down from the steeple and broke into pieces, and every piece was a flint-stone.
Not a word had passed between them; they rode close together in unbroken stillness; they were scarcely visible to each other for there was no moon, and storm-clouds obscured the skies. Now and then their horses' hoofs struck fire from a flint-stone, and the flash sparkled through the darkness; often not even the sound of their gallop was audible on the gray, dry, loose soil.
I had found or at least I thought I had found something that would burn, as I have said before; but what should I do for the first spark? True, with my jack-knife for a steel, and a flint-stone, of which there were plenty, I could strike a spark without any difficulty; but what was there to strike it into, so that it would catch and make a blaze?
On the following morning, at a very early hour, I crossed the Ghaut; in the centre there is a very great declivity on each side the road, about two hundred feet in depth, and the Ghaut is very steep, and covered with flint-stone, which made it very difficult for the horse and cattle to pass: it is about twelve miles in length, and at the foot of it is the village of Badnapore.
Who cried 'steeple-top'?" he muttered. "Oh, can't you see I'm married. She hears it. Oh, spare and pity her!" He wandered into the miasmatic world again, leaving them all touched, yet oppressed. "How the very flint-stone will wear away before the water-drop," Judge Custis finally said; "his obdurate heart has been bruised by that nickname.
On looking on that gloomy surface, it seemed as improbable that anything so bright should come from it as that sparks of real fire should be emitted from the hard flint-stone. Mat Hagan, an Irishman, who pulled the bow oar in my boat, declared that our oars were throwing up to the sky again the reflection of the stars, which had no business to be there at all.
He carried in one hand a peculiar long-handled club, which he had fashioned by lashing, with strips of green hide, a split and jagged flint-stone into the cleft head of a stick. In the other hand he bore two long, slender spears, their tips hardened and pointed in fire.
"They are flint-stone and fire-steel, although the girl looks so quiet. Do not be afraid, there will be some sparks from them!" Thus they talked and laughed; but the starosta of Szczytno turned his evil face toward Sir de Lorche and asked: "Sir, would you like some Merlin to change you by his magic power into that knight?" "Would you, sir?" asked de Lorche.
In my own part of the country folk are more spiritual, more truly Russian, by far than here they are folk with whom the natives of this region are not to be compared, since in the one locality the population has a human soul, whereas in the other locality it is a flint-stone." And with a certain quiet reflectiveness, he loves also to recount a marvellous example of unlooked-for enrichment.
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