Without interrupting my labours I managed to convey to the marvelling Links that I needed more of the wood for bows, arrows and handles. How they would manage to cut this material was more than I knew, yet I reasoned that inasmuch as they must have cut the handles of their clubs, they could do the work by some means or other. Their method surprised me. They built a fire near the place where I had cut the branch for the bow, and getting a peculiar hard wood into a glowing state, pressed the incandescent surface against the limbs desired, and then by blowing, burned them off, not rapidly, but with great neatness. The fiery brand passed through the wood much as a red-hot iron might in the hands of a smith. We were an enthusiastic lot that morning, I directing and working at my flints, some preparing cords, many scraping handles with bits of the glass-like material I had found, and with which they were already familiar, while others bound my hatchets to hafts, rudely finished, and knife blades to smaller odds and ends of wood. It was remarkable how readily they grasped the meaning of various things. Their exclamations of surprise and acknowledgment of the virtue of our growing “arsenal” frequently suggested to me a something as if the fellows were surprised at the real simplicity of all and were wondering why they had never done the like before. After three or four hours the heat of the sun became so great, on my unprotected head, that I abandoned the pebbles long enough to construct a makeshift for a hat. For this I employed some palm leaves, excellently suited to the purpose. The chief eyed all our business with something of a look of sullen disdain. Perhaps it was jealousy beginning to work. He held to his precious club of rock-crystal—which certainly gleamed with great beauty in the rays of sunlight piercing through the leaves—as if it were the all in all that a warrior should require. At his side was a fawning fellow whom I had marked before as lazy, small-headed and much too fond of grinning, in a manner which conveyed no idea of mirth nor good-nature, but which, on the contrary, threw his teeth into disgusting prominence. At about noon, when I was cramped and tired, from my close application to the work, I was glad to see a small detachment of our number returning from an excursion in quest of meat. It was not until a subsequent time that I learned how they drove their game into pits, to replenish the larder, but this day I inaugurated a new system of cooking. It was too great a waste of time for each to cook for himself, or herself, and the women being employed at nothing more arduous than gathering fruits and suckling babes, I saw no reason why they should not become the chefs for the tribe.