"Its name is Zain. In order that you may not forget it I will wind it round your arm." And as if it were merely hard paper he lightly bent the gold plate round the girl's wrist and then pressed the ends of this improvised bracelet together with his steel-like fingers. "Don't forget that this is called Zain and that you got it from me."
The girl looked doubtfully at him as if she would have said: "Is it lawful for you to give away everything here as if it were your own."
But the old man could not look on at this in silence. "Alas! alas! Domnule, give not away uncoined gold. Rather squander coined gold in heaps. The other is of itself a witness against us and thereby we shall furnish a clue to our enemies."
"It is in a good place," replied Fatia Negra; "it is on Anicza's arm and there it will keep silence."
Anicza replied to this apology with ten kisses. And she calculated rightly. This necklace weighed exactly ten double ducats—but the kisses also were double ones.
Then Fatia Negra led them to another machine which cut round gold pieces out of the rolled out "Zain." He showed the girl how every clipper, how every screw beneath the impulsion of the piston did its proper share of the work, and how the whole process was set going by steam power from without and could therefore be directed and controlled by one man with another man to relieve him at intervals.
"Dumnezu!"[20] sighed old Onucz, "when I think that fifty years ago we did all this with only our hammers and chisels! We sweated two whole days over a piece of work which this marvel can do in an hour. And how many hands we employed too!"
[20] My master.
Then they went to another machine. This was a small table whose steel wheels notched the ducats before they passed beneath the stamping machine. Perpetually moving elastic springs pushed the gold pieces forward one after the other, turned them round and jerked them away. You saw no other motive power but a large wheel revolving under a broad strap; the strap disappeared through the floor, it was underneath there that the man who set it in motion lived.
Old Onucz sighed aloud. "What things they do invent now-a-days," said he.