When walking in the country one day I came to a beautiful pond by the side of the road. The water was almost as clear as air, and as I looked down into it, I could see that the bottom was made of granite. The farther shores were cliffs of clean granite thirty or forty feet high and coming down to the water’s edge. The marks of tools could be seen on them, showing where blocks of stone had evidently been split off. I picked up a piece of the rock and examined it closely. It proved to be made up of three kinds of material. First, there were tiny sparkling bits of mica. In some places there are mica mines yielding big sheets of this curious mineral which is used in the doors of stoves and the little windows of automobile curtains. With the point of a knife the bits in my piece of granite could be split into tiny sheets as thin as paper. The second material was quartz. This was grayish-white and looked somewhat like glass. The third material was feldspar. This, too, was whitish, but one or two sides of each bit were flat, as if they had not been broken, but split. This is the most common kind of granite. There are many varieties. Some of them are almost white, some dark gray, others pale pink, and yet others deep red. It is found in more than half the States of the Union.

This quarry had been given up and allowed to fill with water; but it was a granite country, and farther down the road there was another, where scores of men were hard at work. This second quarry was part-way up a hill; or rather, it was a hill of granite which men were digging out and carrying away. When they began to open the quarry, much of the rock was covered with dirt and loose stones, and even the granite that showed aboveground was worn and broken and stained. This is called “trap rock.” The easiest way to get rid of it is to blast with dynamite and then carry away the dirt and fragments. Next comes the getting out of great masses of rock to use, some of them perhaps long enough to make the pillars of a large building.

Now, granite is a hard stone, but there is no special difficulty in cutting it if you know how. In the old days, when people wished to split a big boulder, they sometimes built a fire beside it, and when it was well heated, they dropped a heavy iron ball upon it. King’s Chapel in Boston was built of stone broken in this way. To break from a cliff, however, a block of granite big enough to make a long pillar is a different matter, and this is what the men were doing. First of all, the foreman had examined the quarry till he had found a stratum of the right thickness. He had marked where the ends were to come, and the men had drilled holes down to the bottom of the stratum. Then he had drawn a line at the back along where he wished the split to be, and the men had drilled on this line also a row of holes. Next came the blasting. If one very heavy charge had been exploded, it would probably have shattered the whole mass, or at any rate have injured it badly. Instead of this, they put into each hole a light charge of coarse powder and covered it with sand. These were all fired at the same instant, and thus the great block was loosened from the wall. Sometimes there seems to be no sign of strata, and then a line of horizontal holes must be drilled where the bottom of the block is to be. After this comes what is called the “plug-and-feather” process. Into each hole are placed two pieces of iron, shaped like a pencil split down the middle. These are the “feathers.” The “plug” is a small steel wedge that is put between the iron pieces. Then two men with hammers go down the line and strike each wedge almost as gently as if it was a nut whose kernel they were afraid of crushing. They go down the line again, striking as softly as before. Then, if you look closely, you can see a tiny crack between the holes. There is more hammering, the crack stretches farther, a few of the wedges are driven deeper and the others drop out. The block splits off. A mighty chain is then wound about it, the steam derrick lifts it, lays it gently upon a car, and it is carried to the shed to be cut into shape, smoothed, and perhaps polished.

In almost every kind of work new methods are invented after a while. In quarrying, however, the same old methods are in use. The only difference is that, instead of the work being done by muscle, it is done by compressed air or steam or electricity. Compressed air or steam works the drill and the sledgehammer. The drill is held by an arm, but the arm is a long steel rod which is only guided by the workman. Not the horse-sweep of old times, but the steam derrick and the electric hoist lift the heavy blocks from the quarry. Polishing used to be a very slow, expensive operation, because it was all done by the strength of some one’s right arm, but now, although it takes as much work as ever, this work is done by machinery. To “point” a piece of stone, or give it a somewhat smooth surface, is done now with tools worked by compressed air. After this, the stone is rubbed by machinery, of course with water and emery, then by wet felt covered with pumice or polishing putty. A few years ago two young Vermonters invented a machine that would saw granite. This saw has no teeth, but only blades of iron. Between these blades and the piece of granite, however, shot of chilled steel are poured; and they do the real cutting.

Granite has long been used in building wherever a strong, solid material was needed; but until the sand blast was tried, people thought it impossible to do fine work in this stone. There was a firm in Vermont, however, who believed in the sand blast. They had a contract with the Government to furnish several thousand headstones for national cemeteries. Cutting the names would be slow and costly; so they made letters and figures of iron, stuck them to the stones, and turned on the blast. If a sand blast is only fast enough, it will cut stone harder than itself. The blast was turned upon a stone for five minutes. Then the iron letters were removed. There stood in raised letters the name, company, regiment, and rank of the soldier, while a quarter of an inch of the rest of the stone, which the iron letters had not protected, had been cut away. By means of the sand blast it has become possible to do beautiful carving even in material as hard as granite.

Granite looks so solid that people used to think it was fireproof; but it is really poor material in a great fire. Most substances expand when they are heated; but the three substances of which granite is made do not expand alike, and so they tend to break apart and the granite crumbles.

A marble quarry is even more interesting than a granite quarry. If you stand on a hill in a part of the country where marble is worked, you will see white ledges cropping out here and there. The little villages are white because many of the houses are built of marble. Then, too, there are great marble quarries flashing in the sunshine. Sometimes a marble quarry is chiefly on the surface. Sometimes the marble stretches into the earth, and the cutting follows it until a great cavern is made, perhaps two or three hundred feet deep. A roof is often built to keep out the rain and snow. It keeps out the light, too, and on rainy days the roof, together with the smoke and steam of the engines, makes the bottom of the quarry a gloomy place. Everywhere there are slender ladders with men running up and down them. There are shouts of the men, clanking of chains, and puffing of locomotives.

Marble is cut out in somewhat the same way as granite, but a valuable machine called a “channeler” is much used. This machine runs back and forth, cutting a channel two inches wide along the ends and back and sometimes the bottom of the block to be taken out.

Marble is so much softer than granite that it is far more easy to work. Cutting it is a simple matter. The saw, which is a smooth flat blade of iron, swings back and forth, while between it and the marble sand and water are fed. It does not exactly cut, but rubs, its way through. The round holes in the tops of washstands are cut by saws like this, only bent in the form of a cylinder and turned round and round, going in a little deeper at each revolution. A queer sort of saw is coming into use. It is a cord made of three steel wires twisted loosely together. This cord is stretched tightly over pulleys and moves very rapidly. Every little ridge of the cord strikes the stone and cuts a little of it away.

There are varieties of marble without end. The purest and daintiest is the white of which statues are carved; but there are black, red, yellow, gray, blue, green, pink, and orange in all shades. Many are beautifully marked. The inner walls of buildings are sometimes covered with thin slabs of marble. These are often carefully split, and the two pieces put up side by side, so that the pattern on one is reversed on the other. Certain kinds of marble contain fossils or remains of coral and other animals that lived hundreds of thousands of years ago. In some marbles there are so many that the stone seems to be almost made of them. When a slab is cut and polished, the fossils are of course cut into; but even then we can sometimes see their shape. One of the most common is the crinoid. This was really an animal, but it looked somewhat like a closed pond lily with a long stem, and people used to call it the stone lily. This stem is made up of little flat rings looking like bits of a pipestem. The stems are often broken up and these bits are scattered through the marble. The animals whose shells help to make marble lived in the ocean, and when they died sank to the bottom. Many of the shells were broken by the beating of the waves, but both broken shells and whole ones became united and hardened into limestone, one kind of which we call marble. Common chalk is another kind. Blackboard crayons are made of this: so are whitewash and whiting for cleaning silver and making putty.

Another stone that builders would be sorry to do without is slate. This, too, was formed at the bottom of the sea. Rivers brought down fine particles of clay, which settled, were covered by other matter, and finally became stone. It was formed in layers, of course, but, queerly enough, it splits at right angles to its bottom line. Just why it does this is not quite certain, but the action is thought to be due to heat and long, slow pressure, which will do wonderful things, as in the case of coal. This splitting is a great convenience for the people who want to use it for roofing and for blackboards. Blocks of slate are loosened by blasting, and are taken to the splitting-shed.

Splitting slate needs care, and a man who is not careful should never try to work in a slate quarry. The splitting begins by one man’s dividing the block into pieces about two inches thick and somewhat larger than the slates are to be when finished. The way he does this is to cut a little notch in one end of the block with his “sculpin chisel” and make a groove from this across the block. He must then set his chisel into the groove, strike it with a mallet, and split the slate to the bottom. This sounds easy, but it needs skill. Slate has sometimes its own notions of behavior, and it does not always care to split in a straight line exactly perpendicular to the bottom of the stratum. The man keeps it wet so that he can see the crack more plainly, and if that crack turns back a little to the right, he must turn it to the left by striking the sculpin toward the left, or perhaps by striking a rather heavy blow on the left of the stone itself. Now the chief splitter takes it, and with a broad thin chisel he splits it into plates becoming thinner at each split. The second assistant trims these into the proper shape and size with either a heavy knife or a machine. Slate can be sawed and planed; but whatever is done to it should be done when it first comes from the quarry, for then it is not so likely to break. It would be very much cheaper if so much was not broken and wasted at the quarries and in the splitting. It is said that in Wales sometimes one hundred tons of stone are broken up to get between three and four tons of good slate. Within the last few years the quarrymen have been using channeling machines and getting out the slate in great masses instead of small blocks. This is not so wasteful by any means; but even now there is room for new and helpful inventions.