I was aroused by the sound of a strange hammering, blows following each other rapidly and with a quality of sound it seemed to me I had never heard before. It was not like that of stone upon wood or of stone upon stone, but had at times a faint ring, a something altogether unfamiliar. I had been sleeping peacefully in the sun, lying in the grass of a plot among bushes which grew in a valley-like gorge between rocky walls and having many boulders scattered about upon its surface. I sprang to my feet and emerged from the bushes to discover the cause of the curious hammering, and recognized the scene, though somewhat slowly. The Hammer was at work with two companions, and I knew that I should have been helping him had I not become tired and gone to the sunny spot in the bushes to rest and sleep a little. The Hammer--he had gained the name because he was, nowadays, doing little else than swing his big stone hammer in seeking to acquire what had never been much sought before--saw me approaching and hailed me boisterously: “Ho! Did you sleep, Scar, big laggard? Here is more mauling for you.” There was mauling to be done, assuredly. All three of the men were at work, standing beside a flat boulder upon which they were seeking to pound to little fragments uneven chunks of rock, which, from their shape, must have been somehow broken from a larger body. As I drew nearer I saw that among the fragments the men were thus seeking to pulverize, there appeared lumps and shreds and strips of a substance which did not break beneath the blows, though it might bend and flatten. Then what remained of the daze of my sleeping went away in a moment and I knew the why and wherefore of what was here before me. The red substance was the thing Hammer had found in the pronged rock and was copper, as we came to call it, something now most precious to us and in the getting of which we were all assisting Hammer to the utmost. What arrow-heads and spear-heads he had given us! There had been never others to equal them.