With a cry of joy I rose up, to exhibit to the staring eyes of Tom Bulk a glittering yellow stone.
“Gold, Tom—gold!” I exclaimed. “And here’s more and more!”
I stooped down, to bring up two, three, four more lumps of the same glittering yellow stone.
“No, ’tain’t, Mas’r Harry,” said Tom, gruffly, as he turned over one of the fragments in his hand. “That ain’t gold at all; that’s what they calls mica. I allers reclect the name, cause it’s the same as one of the prophets we used to read about at school. You might get plenty of that in the rocks, without much trouble. It’s just the same stuff as some mates of mine once got out of a gravel pit at home, and they took it to the watchmaker in the town, and they says to him, ‘What’s that gold worth?’ they says. ‘Which gold?’ he says. ‘Why, that,’ they says. ‘That’s no more gold than you are,’ he says; ‘that’s mica.’ And then he told them that they might allers tell gold in a moment, by pulling out a knife and trying to cut it, when if it was gold it would cut easy like, just the same as a piece of lead. Try that, Mas’r Harry.”
Snatching out my knife, I cut at one of the pieces of yellow stone, to find it splinter under the keen edge of my blade.
“I’ll swear, though, that the pynt of that rod hit something else besides them bits of stone, Mas’r Harry. Try again; or, no—let me try.”
The disappointment was so keen, that for a few moments I was speechless, and offered no opposition to Tom, who began to grope about with both hands to bring up dozens more pieces of the micaceous rock, and then a piece of flint that seemed to have been chipped into shape, and then a long obsidian blade.
“We’re a-coming to something after all, Mas’r Harry,” said Tom. “Here’s a cur’osity, and here—here—here’s—pah! I don’t like handling them.”
As he spoke, Tom held out to my view three or four blackened bones, which he threw down again amongst the sand and water at the bottom.
“We shall come to the leaden coffin after all, Mas’r Harry,” he said. “This has been a berryin’ place after a fight, p’r’aps; but is it worth while to disturb it?”