THE HUMOROUS SIDE OF FLINT IMPLEMENT HUNTING.
11
I find it?" said the man ; "why, I found it here, on this road. I was out of
work at the time, as you might be now, and I was walking up and down thinking
of where I could get a job, when I suddenly saw the duck's head. 'Is it exactly
like a duck's head,' you say ; I'll make a sketch of it." With this my companion
took off his greasy chimney-pot hat, drew out a thick carpenter's pencil, and began
to draw a duck's head inside the crown of his hat. "Ah," said I, "if the stone is
no more like a duck's head than that sketch no doubt it must be a natural form."
This remark made the old man exceedingly angry. He threw his hat violently
on the ground, and gave it a terrific kick. He then cast his pencil away, and
said, "Sir, I see you are not a scientific man ; I took you to be a geologist, but I
see you are not a scientific man." The little man then left me, went at his ruined
hat again, kicked it to atoms, and walked off bareheaded.
The same day, whilst in the railway cutting at Little Ealing, an excavator asked
me if I had ever found the head of a Roman. "No," said I, "never." "Well,
I have," said the man, "for I found one on the railway cutting near Dover, with a
bayonet underneath it. I tried to sell the skull, but I could not get rid of it. I
expects I asked too much." "What became of the skull?" said I. "What
became of it ? Why, I got a hammer and knocked all the teeth out and sold the
teeth for a bob a piece, and cheap too, for the teeth of a Roman." "I don't
expect," continued the man, "I should have been able to get a bob out of a
grinning bloke like you."
Most valley gravels and sands are so manifestly water-laid, that a general belief
exists amongst gravel and sand diggers, that these materials were deposited by the
Flood mentioned in the Bible. I have often been questioned on this point, and
some men esteem the Flood of the Bible as an event not far removed in time. I
have often heard it mentioned as having occurred about a thousand years ago—
sometimes it is referred to as "some hundreds of years ago." I once told
some Stoke Newington diggers that "the sharp little tools found about there
were made by men who lived before the Flood." This remark impressed the
men, and soon afterwards one of the excavators said to me "Me and my mates has
been talking a good deal about these little flint tools being made by men before
the Flood, but we can't think what they wanted them for. One of my mates
said, as we all know flint cuts glass, that perhaps Noah and his sons had a
lot of these tools made before the Flood so that they might cut the glass for
the windows of the Ark. For when we think of it," said the man, "there
must have been a tremendous number of windows in that Ark."
A man once brought me a stone late at night. I looked at it under the gaslight,
and said that it was a natural stone ; the man replied, "You'll find it a genuine
tool by daylight.''
Another man, who received a similar reply from me, said he had shown the
stone to his wife, and she said that she was certain it was a genuine one.
I happened to be passing the new Vestry building in South Hornsey on the
opening day. There was a heap of newly excavated gravel in the road exactly
opposite the door; on the top of the heap there was an implement (No. 594 in
my collection—the only implement found in South Hornsey by me). A corpulent
Vestrymen, on emerging from the building, saw me put the large stone in my coat
pocket. He came to me, and put his arm through mine, and said, "I see, sir, that
you must be a scientific man, or you would never have put that big stone into your
pocket! You shall come in and see our new Vestry building." With that he
took me all over the building and explained it, but he said no more about the stone.