“Well, I’m only telling you what I’ve heard. I don’t know anything about it, myself; but they say it’s a very rare weed and that the woodpecker goes to look for it in the mountains so that it may harden and whet its beak on it. And anything you touch to that weed becomes as hard as the best steel. What a find that would be for my scythe and my hedging-bill, my sickle and grafting-knife! I know many a man that would give a bag of gold for the woodpecker’s secret.” The young cabbage plants had by this time received enough water, and it was now the lettuce’s turn. Jacques went back to his work and left the boys to puzzle over the question whether or not there was any truth in this story of the woodpecker’s fear lest it might bore through the tree trunk with each peck of its beak. They brought the matter up that evening in their talk with their uncle. “There is both truth and falsehood in what my good Jacques told you,” he said. “The true is what he saw with his own eyes, the false what he repeats from hearsay among the country folk. He told you correctly about the woodpecker’s different cries, which he knows so well from having heard them over and over again; and he was right about the bird’s way of running around to the other side of the trunk that it has just struck several times with its beak. All the rest is false, or, rather, an amusing legend with a basis of fact which we will now examine. “Woodpeckers live solely on insects and larvæ, especially those species of insects and larvæ that are found in wood. The large grubs of capricorn-beetles, stag-beetles, long-horn beetles, and others are their favorite dish. To get at them they have to clear away the dead bark and bore into the worm-eaten wood beneath. The instrument used in this rough work is the bird’s beak, which is straight and wedge-shaped, square at the base, fluted lengthwise, and shaped at the point like a carpenter’s chisel. It is so hard and durable that, in order to account for a tool of such perfection, some simple-minded wood-cutter made up the story that has been repeated ever since, the childish story of the ironweed. Need I tell you that there is nothing in the world that by its mere touch can give to objects the hardness of iron or steel?” “I had my doubts,” Jules declared, “when Jacques was telling us about it; I couldn’t believe in his wonderful weed.”