Black Bartlemys Treasure

"But if you have no saw, Martin--?"

"I will make me a chisel instead." Crossing to the fire I found my iron red-hot, and taking it betwixt two flat pieces of wood that served me for tongs I laid it upon my stone anvil, and fell forthwith to beating and shaping it with the hammer-back of my hatchet until I had beaten out a blade some two inches wide. Having cooled my chisel in the brook I betook me to sharpening it on a stone moistened with water, and soon had wrought it to a good edge. I now selected from my timber a board sufficiently wide, and laying this on my anvil-stone began to cut a piece from the plank with hammer and chisel, the which I found a work requiring great care, lest I split my wood, and patience, since my chisel, being of iron, needed much and repeated grinding. Howbeit it was done at last, and the result of my labour a piece of wood about two feet square, and behold the seat of my stool!

Now was my companion idle for, while all this is a-doing, she sets the turtle-shell on the fire with water and collops of meat cut with my knife, and, soon as it simmers, breaks into it divers herbs she had dried in the sun; and so comes to watch and question me at my work, yet turning, ever and anon, to stir at the stew with her new spoon, whereby I soon began to snuff a savour methought right appetising. As time passed, this savour grew ever more inviting and my hunger with it, my mouth a-watering so that I might scarce endure, as I told her to her no small pleasure.

"Had I but a handful of salt, Martin!" sighs she.

"Why, comrade," says I, pausing 'twixt two hammer-strokes, "Wherefore this despond? If you can make stew so savoury and with nought but flesh of an old goat and a few dried herbs, what matter for salt?" At this she laughed and bent to stir at her stew again.

"There's plenty of salt in the sea yonder," says she presently.

"True, but how to come at it?"

"How if we boiled sea-water, Martin?"

"'Tis method unknown to me," says I, whittling at a leg of my stool, "but we can try."

And now in the seat of my stool I burned three good-sized holes or sockets, and having trimmed three lengths of wood, I fitted these into my socket-holes, and there was my stool complete. This done, I must needs call her from her cooking to behold it; and though it was no more than a square of roughish wood set upon three pegs, she praised and viewed it as it had been a great elbow chair and cushioned at that! Hereupon, puffed up with my success, I must immediately begin to think upon building us a table and chairs, but being summoned to dinner I obeyed her gladly enough. And she seated on her stool with me on the ground beside her and our turtle-shell dish before us, we ate with hearty good-will until, our hunger appeased, we fell to talk: She: 'Tis marvellous how well I eat.