“Gold is what is called a perfect metal,” replied the Thimble; “it is injured by neither fire nor water, and it is reckoned of great value in the world. It is found chiefly in South America, California, and lately in the immense island of Australia.”
“And has it to submit to the hammer as well as we?” I inquired.
“It has much more wonderful power of enduring it than either silver or steel,” replied the Thimble. “It never breaks beneath the heaviest stroke, but it spreads itself out beneath it, and that to such an amazing extent that I have heard that a bit of gold not so large as a halfpenny can be beaten out into a wire a thousand miles long.”
I was not a little astonished to hear this, and I was still more so as the Thimble proceeded.
“Look around you, and, even in this room, you will see wonderful proofs of the malleability of gold—that is the name given to this curious property which it possesses. See the picture-frames glittering in the light, the shining pattern on the paper on the wall, the edge of all those gaily bound books; they owe their beauty to a layer of gold so thin that, though that metal is one of the heaviest known, the gentlest sigh would have blown the leaves away.”
“And is gold useful for anything but gilding?” said I.
“It is much used in various ways,” she replied; “amongst others, it was formerly much employed in medicine, and is now used in giving a fine red colour to glass.”
“And is this beautiful and wonderful metal also dug out of the earth?”
“It is procured in some places,” answered the Thimble, “by washing carefully sand drawn from the beds of some rivers, which is mixed with particles of gold; but it is chiefly found by digging.”
“Well, then,” cried I, rather triumphantly, “though silver and gold be both esteemed more perfect and more precious than iron and steel, man would have very little chance of gaining either of them without the help of a humbler metal! If silver be like knowledge, and virtue like gold, to what shall iron be compared.”