Copper Sheathing and Nails.
Copper sheathing has been used by boat-builders and made to serve a useful purpose, protecting the ship's bottom and resisting the action of salt water. Oftentimes this valuable material—costly when new—has been used over again when vessels have been broken up, and not infrequently it is put to curious uses in old seaport towns. Visitors to an old-world village built on the side of a hill near the sea in North Cornwall, have looked with admiration upon two remarkable gateposts in front of a cottage house, and admired their quaint carvings. These relics in oak were once the ends of seats in a neighbouring parish church; but either to preserve them from injury from the village children or to give them a longer life as they would be exposed to the weather, the upper portions have been sheathed with copper from the bottom of some broken-up wreck, and large copper nails keep the casing in place. Copper and brass nails have been used for ornament as well as to resist acids and other metal-destroying chemicals. Old furniture is evidence of this; for at one time the leather covers to the chairs were almost invariably fixed by round-headed brass studs, which from that use became known in the trade as "chair nails." Such nails were used to ornament brass bellows and other domestic utensils. They were also used to "decorate" the skin-covered trunks which our ancestors took with them on their rare journeys of pleasure or business, when they travelled by the mail-coach or less expensive stage wagon. Nails of brass have been used and are still sometimes used for sadder purposes, for they are a feature in the ornament of cloth-covered coffins. That of King Edward VI was decorated (sic) with upwards of two thousand brass nails with gilt heads.