Long we talked that night beside our fire, glorying in our good fortune and wondering, too, not a little, how it could be that copper should exist in such a form. Much we speculated and suggested of this strange thing which had brought such fortune to us. Hammer thought it possible that the red metal was something which grew of itself where there were the things in the earth and water which gave such growth, whatever it was it needed for its formation and sustenance, but in this I could not agree with him. I could not believe that anything that was hard as rock and did not change its shape as the trees and plants did, could really grow of itself. I believed that all solid things must have been so always and that, if they were found out of what seemed to have been their place, they must have been moved by something else, it might be by men--though that could hardly be so with huge rocks--or by great floods, or, it might be, by the ice, which, in ages gone, had crept down from the far north and pushed many things before it. No one could tell. Perhaps the copper had not moved far at most. It might have come down from the mountains. We ended the talk as vain; it was sufficient that we had found what we sought. We had much to do on the morrow. At daylight we took up our journey for the village, carrying with us only what we had beaten from the rocks, and one of the smallest of the fragments we had found among the beeches and oaks. Henceforth our work with copper was to be in a different way. We had reasoned upon it and had decided what we would do. At first it had seemed wise to move our belongings to where the metal lay to our hand, but there were other things to be considered.