The Dragon in the Cliff Read Online Free PDF

as if I had been set free, free from Mrs. Harris and her beatings, free from the boredom of sitting with the other girls at school practicing fine needlework, free from their sharp tongues, their backbiting, and their snobbery. I would miss sitting near Lizzie Adams and whispering with her when Mrs. Harris’s back was turned. But there was little else about school I would miss. I was going to the beach with Papa.
    The next morning I rushed through the breakfast dishes and bounded into the shop to begin my real education. Seeing me, Papa shook his head. “Mary, you are sadly mistaken if you think that collecting curiosities is always exciting. Now that you are here with me every day you shall see that I have my share of slow, hard work, and today is one of those days. I have curiosities to prepare for the travelers, and that is just as slow and careful work as lace making or needlework.”
    â€œOh, but Papa, I love working down here with you,” I protested.
    â€œWe’ll see what you think after you have been at it a bit,” Papa said dryly. “I’m going to teach you how to cut an ammonite so that its insides can be seen. The ladies who come to bathe in the sea find their swirling chambers beautiful, and I can sell all I can cut.”
    He showed me how to choose which curiosities to open and how to saw the soft stone with a toothless metal band and wet sand. “The trick is to keep the sand in the path of the saw wet,” he said, loosening the peg in the barrel he had rigged so that water dribbled onto the sand from a hole in the bottom. “Actually it is the wet sand that does the cutting, not the saw.”
    I was clumsy, and I found that while the stone was not hard as stone goes, it was hard enough to make my progress slow. Papa took over from me after a while so that the ammonite would be ready for the next day when the coach came bringing the travelers and visitors who were our most frequent customers. When the curiosity was finally cut through, Papa set me to polishing it with wet sand on a slab of limestone. For a final polishing he showed me how to use a wet leather cloth covered with chalk dust. “Now it will fetch a pretty penny,” he said approvingly, when I showed him the polished fossil.
    â€œIt’s so beautiful, and it took so long. Can’t we keep it ourselves?” I begged.
    Papa shook his head. “No, Mary, my dear. We can’t keep it, lovely as it is, no more than Mama can keep the lace she makes, or I the tables and cabinets.”
    I was disappointed and asked, “Why is it only rich people who can have fine things?”
    â€œYou know as well as I, Mary, they have them because they can afford to pay for them,” Papa replied. “And I don’t need to tell you that we need the money it will bring in. So we had better get on with the work and get some other things ready as well.”
    The next morning, before going off to the smith’s to have the chisels sharpened, I set the ammonite out on the table with the other curiosities we had for sale. It was gone when I returned. I meant to ask Papa who bought it, but my question was forgotten in the rush of customers.
    The days that followed were, like the first, filled with lessons—where to find curiosities, how to get them out of the rock, and how to prepare them so that they show to advantage. Papa showed me the best places to look for certain curiosities. I knew that the cliffs were made up of layers of rock, one laid upon the other. But it was Papa who told me that Lias means layers. “You’ll find different curiosities in different layers. Some places, like the Black Ven marl and the Church Cliffs’ blue Lias, are rich in curiosities, and others, like the upper green sand over toward Golden Cap, have little of worth.”
    The next few months were crammed with such lessons. Now I can see that Papa was in a hurry to teach me everything he knew. And I, not