Then, placing a "quarter" with his left hand the leather pad that covers his knee, he will, with an oblong hammer, strike off flake after flake, perhaps 1,500 in a morning; and finally will work these up into sharp-edged squares to serve as gun-flints for the trade with native Africa.

Alas! the palmy days of knapping gun-flints for the British Army will never return to Brandon.
Still, there must have been trade depression in those parts at any time from the bronze-age up to the times of Brown Bess; for the strike-a-lights, still to be got at a penny each, can have barely kept the wolf from the door.

And Mr.Snare is not merely an artisan but an artist.

He has chipped out a flint ring, a feat which taxed the powers of the clever neolithic knappers of pre-dynastic Egypt; whilst with one of his own flint fishhooks he has taken a fine trout from the Little Ouse that runs by the town.
Thus there are things in old England that are older even than some of our friends wot.

In that one county of Suffolk, for instance, the good flint--so rich in colour as it is, and so responsive to the hammer, at any rate if you get down to the lower layers or "sases," for instance, the floorstone, or the black smooth-stone that is generally below water-level--has served the needs of all the palaeolithic periods, and of the neolithic age as well, and likewise of the modern Englishmen who fought with flintlocks at Waterloo, or still more recently took out tinder-boxes with them to the war in South Africa.