Close beside my mother I sat on a rug, with a scrap of buckskin in one hand and an awl in the other.

The new-comers surrounded my friend of the brad-awl with cries of grief and sympathy, and then, turning upon me, they brandished their knives and howled at me like the gang of assassins that they were.

The tailor threw away his needle and grasped the sword, the shoemaker exchanged his awl for a dagger, and all these quiet, humble citizens had been transformed by hatred and fear, anger and terror, into most belligerent heroes.

I stooped to pick it up, and as I did so the priest silently leaped upon my shoulders and drove his brad-awl into my eye!

The restrictions of more abstemious times have relegated the ancient bar to dust, the idle awl to slow-consuming rust.