At home afterwards in the shed, while Bevis shaved the fir-pole for the mast, Mark was set to carve the leaping-pole, for the South Sea savages have everything carved. He could hardly cut the hard dried bark of the ash, which had shrunk on and become like wood. He made a spiral notch round it, and then searched till he found his old spear, which had to be ornamented and altered into a bone harpoon. A bone from the kitchen was sawn off while in the vice, and then half through two inches from the largest end. Tapping a broad chisel gently, Mark split the bone down to the sawn part, and then gradually filed it sharp. He also filed three barbs to it, and then fitted the staff of the spear into the hollow end. While he was engraving lines and rings on the spear with his pocket-knife, the dinner interrupted his work. Bevis, wearying of the mast, got some flints, and hammered them to split off flakes for arrowheads, but though he bruised his fingers, he could not chip the splinters into shape. The fracture always ran too far, or not far enough. John Young, the labourer, came by as he was doing this sitting on the stool in the shed, and watched him. “I see a man do that once,” said John. “How did he do it? tell me? what’s the trick?” said Bevis, impatient to know. “Aw, I dunno; I see him at it. A’ had a gate-hinge snopping um.” The iron hinge of a gate, if removed from the post, forms a fairly good hammer, the handle of iron as well as the head. “Where was it? what did he do it for?” “Aw, up in the Downs. Course he did it to soil um.” The prehistoric art of chipping flints lingered among the shepherds on the Downs, till the percussion-cap came in, and no longer having to get flakes for the flintlock guns they slowly let it disappear. Young had seen it done, but could not describe how. Bevis battered his flints till he was tired; then he took up the last and hurled it away in a rage with all his might. The flint whirled over and over and hummed along the ground till it struck a small sarsen or boulder by the wood-pile, put there as a spur-stone to force the careless carters to drive straight. Then it flew into splinters with the jerk of the stoppage. “Here’s a sharp ’un,” said John Young, picking up a flake, “and here’s another.” Altogether there were three pointed flakes which Bevis thought would do. Mark had to bring some reeds next day from the place where they grew half a mile below his house in a by-water of the brook. They were green, but Bevis could not wait to dry them. He cut them off a little above the knot or joint, split the part above, and put the flint flake in, and bound it round and round with horsehair from the carter’s store in the stable. But when they were finished, they were not shot off, lest they should break; they were carried indoors into the room upstairs where there was a bench, and which they made their armoury.