mining tools, pick and spade.

Oh, that Geissler! Unchanged, the same as ever; meeting and greeting
as if nothing had happened, talked to the children, went into the
house and came out again, looked over the ground, opened the doors of
cowshed and hayloft and looked in. "Excellent!" said he. "Isak, have
you still got those bits of stone?"

"Bits of stone?" said Isak, wondering.

"Little heavy lumps of stone I saw the boy playing with when I was
here once before."

The stones were out in the larder, serving as weights for so many
mouse-traps; Isak brought them in. Geissler and the two men examined
them, talking together, tapped them here and there, weighed them in
the hand. "Copper," they said.

"Could you go up with us and show where you found them?" asked
Geissler.

They all went up together; it was not far to the place where Isak had
found the stones, but they stayed up in the hills for a couple of
days, looking for veins of metal, and firing charges here and there.
They came down to Sellanraa with two bags filled with heavy lumps of
stone.

Isak had meanwhile had a talk with Geissler, and told him everything
as to his own position: about the purchase of the land, which had come
to a hundred _Daler_ instead of fifty.