56 Spring 



oldest village industry, are very well entitled to succeed. 

 Most of the workmen confess, however, that they are 

 less skilful at their trade than were those workers 

 of remote antiquity. They find it so difficult so im- 

 possible to imitate the elf arrow that some feel sure 

 it must have been the fairies who made it. ' Not a 

 single skilled workman in Brandon,' wrote Mr. James 

 Wyatt more than twenty years ago, ' has ever suc- 

 ceeded in producing the beautiful conchoidal waves, 

 crimpings, and ripple-work displayed on the surface 

 of tools and weapons found in Scandinavia.' That is 

 a very mild way of stating the inability of the men of 

 to-day. A simple arrow-head found in one of the 

 Brandon fields is so much beyond their imitation that 

 they say that at the making of it there must have 

 been either witchcraft or instruments that have been 

 lost ! But then none of them has (like a well-known 

 practitioner at the Giant's Causeway) made it the busi- 

 ness of his life to make sham arrow-heads. Nor have 

 they any idea that a skilled archaeologist, by studying 

 the methods of those Polynesians, Esquimaux, and 

 others who still use flint implements, can with a rein- 

 deer's horn tied to a bit of wood produce a close ap- 

 proach to all but the most ornate of antique weapons. 

 The Brandon knapper's skill is indubitable, but it is con- 

 centrated on two or three strokes which serve to pro- 

 duce the perfectly unadorned gun-flint of modern times. 

 A gun-flint, or strike-alight, is almost the simplest 

 stone implement that can be made, and the knapper, 



