the other hand, he did not like very well to refuse to help
Phonny out of his difficulties. He finally concluded to undertake the
work. So he took the cage down from the bench and put it upon the
floor; he borrowed the iron square and the compasses from Stuyvesant;
he ruled a line along the top of the box at the right distance from
the edge, and marked off places for the holes, half an inch apart,
along this line, pricking in, at the places for the holes, deep, with
one of the points of the compass. When this had all been done he went
on boring the holes.

Stuyvesant was now ready to nail the cross-bars to the side pieces of
the ladder. He asked Phonny where he kept his nails. Phonny showed him
a box where there was a great quantity of nails of all sizes, some
crooked and some straight, some whole and some broken, and all mixed
up in confusion with a mass of old iron, such as rings, parts of
hinges, old locks and fragments of keys. Stuyvesant selected from this
mass a nail, of the size that he thought was proper, and then went to
his ladder to apply it, to see whether it would do.

"It is too large," said Phonny.

"No," said Stuyvesant, "it is just right. I want the nail to go
through and come out on the other side, so that I can clinch it."

"You can't clinch such nails as these," said Phonny. "They are cut
nails, and they will break off if you try to clinch them."

"But I shall soften them first," said Stuyvesant.

"Soften them!" said Phonny, "how can you do that?"

"By putting them in the fire," said Stuyvesant.

"He can't soften them, can he, Wallace?" said Phonny.

"Yes," said Wallace, "he can soften them so that they will clinch."

This was true. What are called cut-nails, are made by machinery. They
are cut from flat-bars or plates of iron, almost red-hot, by a massive
and ponderous engine carried by water. At the same instant that the
nail is cut off from the end of the plate by the cutting part of the
engine, the end of it is flattened into a head by another part, which
comes up suddenly and compresses the iron at that end with prodigious
force. The nail is then dropped, and it falls down, all hot, into a
box made to receive it below.

The prodigious pressure to which the hot iron is subjected in the
process of making cut-nails, seems as it were to press the particles
of iron closer together, and make the metal more compact and hard.
The consequence is, that such nails are very stiff, and if bent m