Brass, Bronze, or Copper? The Alloy Test at Fort Wilkins
Dr. G. G. Wilkins shows how to tell copper, brass and bronze apart with no laboratory, using color, ring, file bite, magnet and flame. He explains why zinc in brass spoils a still's worm, how tin makes bronze hard enough for cannon and bells, and why the new 1864 bronze cents fight his counterstamp punch, while Barnaby the bear does a poor job as hot-metal cooling supervisor. Retired Wilkes County runner Junior Vance tells new stories about a brass-patched still, a cracked church bell sold as scrap, a brass petcock that nearly got him caught, and his granny's dime-ringing stove lid. Cletus 'Rabbit' Miller of Wilkesboro asks about hickory ashes and red oak shavings in the thump keg, and Wilkins explains what potash and oak tannin really do.
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Full episode transcript
♦ Audible wax cylinder surface crackle, slow drip of clear distillate into a glass jar
♦ Barnaby the black bear grunting and chain clinking outside log cabin window
Wilkins: Barnaby. BARNABY. Get your snout out of that quench trough, you four-hundred-pound sack of ill intentions! That water is for hot copper, not for washing your whiskers. Settle down, or I will sell your hide to a Concord lawyer to upholster his conscience.
♦ Bear huffs wetly, chain drops into mud with a slap
Wilkins: There. He is sulking. A bear sulks like a deacon caught at the faro table: loud, wet, and certain he is the injured party.
♪ 1860s parlor banjo and mountain fiddle theme with antique warmth
Wilkins: Good evening, friends, sinners, and the one revenue man I know is listening with his ear pressed to the stovepipe. Welcome to Radio Moonshine with Alchemist G. G. Wilkins, broadcasting from Fort Wilkins on the Suncook Valley Turnpike, Route 28, in Pittsfield, New Hampshire. I am your host, Dr. George G. Wilkins: tooth-puller, blacksmith, inventor, coin-stamper, and twice a guest of the Merrimack County sheriff.
Wilkins: Tonight's lesson is Brass, Bronze, or Copper? The Alloy Test at Fort Wilkins. Every scrap peddler on the Dover road swears his metal is pure copper, the way every bridegroom swears he was a choirboy. I will teach you to catch the liars with nothing but your eyes, your ears, a good file, a fire, and a suspicious nature. Later the fastest hand on a Carolina mountain road, Junior Vance, joins me, and Rabbit Miller of Wilkesboro has sent a question about hickory ashes. But first, the man with the voice like a medicine wagon.
♪ Brief brass-band flourish, slightly out of tune
Announcer: A quick word, friends! A vapor leak at a joint is a fire waiting to happen. Seal your rig tight with Heavy-Duty Sanitary Tri-Clamp Ferrules and Gaskets from Moonshine Stills, just thirty-four dollars and ninety-five cents. Shop hardware at moonshinestill.com!
♪ Flourish ends with a cymbal crash
Announcer: Program note: distilling spirits for drinking without a federal permit is against United States law. This program is for history and education only.
♪ Theme fades under
Where New England Got Its Copper, And How It Got Cheated
♦ Wax crackle, fire popping in a forge
Wilkins: Start with the family. There are three cousins in this story. Copper is the patriarch: soft, red, honest, and easy to bend, like a good grandmother. Brass is copper that married zinc. It went yellow and showy and likes to pass itself off as gold. Bronze is copper that married tin. It went brown and hard and joined the army. Put plainly, brass is copper that married into money and got loud about it, and bronze is copper that enlisted and got hard.
Wilkins: Where does a New Hampshire man get copper in 1865? Not from his own back pasture, I promise you. Paul Revere, the midnight rider himself, gave up riding for rolling. In 1801 he opened the first copper-rolling mill in America at Canton, Massachusetts, and rolled the sheathing for the frigate Constitution, so Old Ironsides is really Old Copper-Bottom. Revere's sheet came up the coast and inland by oxcart for fifty years after.
Wilkins: Closer to home there are the Vermont mines: the Elizabeth Mine at Strafford and the Ely works at Vershire. They roast and smelt that green-stained ore till the hills look like the Devil has sneezed on them. The Vermont copper comes down the Connecticut, over by wagon through Concord, and up our turnpike here. And since the forties the Lake Superior country in Michigan has been digging out lumps of native copper as big as a church, pure enough to hammer straight out of the ground. That has kept the price from hanging us all, though this war has pushed it up hard. Every cannon foundry in the Union wants copper for bronze, and every cartridge works wants it for brass.
Wilkins: So the scrap trade went wild. A man with an old kettle has a small fortune, and a man with a wagon of old ship sheathing from the Portsmouth yard thinks he is a Rothschild. Here is the trick: half of what they call copper sheathing is not copper. It is Muntz metal, a brass of about sixty parts copper to forty parts zinc, patented in 1832 by a Birmingham man named George Muntz. Ship-owners bought it because it was cheaper than copper. Scrap men sell it because it looks like copper in bad light to a man who is drunk.
♦ Bear grunt outside, chain rattle
Wilkins: Which brings me to the Pinchbeck Peddler. Pinchbeck, for the young ones, is the cheap brass a London clockmaker named Pinchbeck made up to look like gold, and the word has meant 'fake' ever since. This fellow came up from Dover two Augusts ago in a checked waistcoat, all whiskers and confidence. His wagon was stacked with sheathing that he swore by his mother's grave was pure Revere copper, twelve dollars the lot.
Wilkins: I took one sheet to the anvil, gave it three strokes of the file, and it came up yellow as a canary's backside. I told him so. He told me I was a tooth-yanking backwoods quack. Then he made the error of his life: he grabbed back his sheet and stepped right over Barnaby's chain to get to his wagon.
♦ Low bear growl rising
Wilkins: Barnaby does not hold with fraud, and he holds even less with men walking across his supper path. He came off that stump like a sack of anvils dropped down a well. He took the man by the coattails first, and the coattails gave with a sound like a sail tearing in a gale. Then he took a second bite, which got the man's trousers and a good strip of what the trousers had been guarding. It peeled off like the rind off a boiled ham. I heard that peddler hit a note no Concord soprano ever reached, a high, curdling C. He went over the stone wall without touching it, left one boot in the pigweed, and dropped Muntz metal all down the turnpike like a hen dropping feathers.
Wilkins: Being a professional, I chased him down by the Suncook bridge and laid him face-down across a flour barrel. I closed that seat of his with harness thread and a sail needle while he called on every saint in the Roman calendar and some I think he invented. Eleven stitches. I billed him for the thread, the needle, and the trauma to the bear. He came for twelve dollars and left with eleven stitches, one boot, and a new way of sitting a wagon. And I kept the sheathing. It makes a fine set of yellow hinges, and that is all brass is good for around a still. More on that soon.
♪ Banjo sting
Coins, Deputies, And A Guest From The Carolina Hills
♦ Wax crackle, coins jingling in a tin
Wilkins: You know I stamp my name on coins at this anvil: G. G. WILKINS, PITTSFIELD N.H. What you may not know is that the Treasury has gone and changed the metal on me. The old large cents, the big ones you could stop a wagon wheel with, were near enough pure copper, soft as cheese. Strike your punch and the letters bite in deep and handsome. Then came the Flying Eagle and the first Indian Head cents, eighty-eight parts copper and twelve parts nickel, pale as a consumptive poet and hard as a miser's heart. My punch rang off them like a church bell hit with a spoon.
Wilkins: Now Congress has passed the Coinage Act of 1864. The cent is bronze, about ninety-five parts copper to five of tin and zinc, thinner and lighter than before. Along with it they gave us a bronze two-cent piece, the first coin in the land to say 'In God We Trust.' Of course it took a war to get the Treasury to trust anybody. That new bronze cent is so hard and thin that my punch bounces off it like a temperance lecture off a teamster. I have to anneal the whole tin of them in the forge first to soften them, and the bear thinks it is supper cooking every time.
Wilkins: Metal has fooled the law too. On my first arrest, a deputy whose name I will keep to myself to spare his grandchildren the shame came into the still-house. He found my old brass mash kettle, the one I boil hog feed in, declared it the still, and hauled it to Concord in the back of a buggy like he had caught the Devil's own soup pot. The real copper was in the woodshed under a cord of maple, laughing at him. The magistrate looked at that kettle, looked at the deputy, and asked him whether he had ever seen a still. The deputy said not before that day, and it turned out he still had not.
♦ Bear snort
Wilkins: My guest tonight knows his metals from the hard end. He hauled loads down out of the Brushy Mountains of North Carolina, and no man there drove a mountain road faster. Junior Vance, welcome to Fort Wilkins.
Junior: Doc, glad to be here. I have to say your bear's been watching me through that window like I'm a pork chop with legs.
Wilkins: He is judging your fat content, Junior. Don't take it personally. He does it to the preacher too. Now, you have told me you got cheated on metal once.
Junior: Cheated and shamed, Doc. Fella over by Moravian Falls had a pot he swore up and down was pure copper. It was black with soot and smoke, real pretty, looked like it'd made liquor since the Flood. I paid him in cash money and ran two batches through it. The second batch came off with a greenish cast to it, and an old boy who bought a jar spent the whole night hugging a fencepost, throwing up everything down to his raising.
Wilkins: White vitriol, Junior. Zinc, sure as sin. Doctors use zinc vitriol to make a patient vomit and charge a dollar for it. You were giving it away free.
Junior: Well, I didn't know the fancy name. I took my pocketknife to that pot and scratched under the soot, and every patch on the bottom came up yellow as a buttercup. Brass patches, soldered in where the copper had burnt through. I took a sledge to the whole thing right there in the yard and sold it for scrap. Then I went and found that fella.
Wilkins: And what did you do to him?
Junior: I sold him a mule. Blind in one eye and mean in both.
Wilkins: Now that is Christian justice. Tell me about the bell.
Junior: Oh, the bell. A Baptist church up near Traphill had a bell crack in a cold snap. Some fellas stole the pieces out of the churchyard and came around selling them to every still man in three counties as 'copper,' a dollar a pound. They brought me a chunk. I took it down to the creek and knocked it on a big rock, and Doc, that thing SANG. Rang like Sunday morning. Copper don't ring like that. Copper goes thunk, like a sack of meal.
Wilkins: Bell metal, Junior. Four parts copper to one of tin. The tin makes it hard and makes it sing, and it also makes it brittle as a spinster's patience. Did you try to bend it?
Junior: Tried to bend it over a stump to see if I could get a worm out of it, and it snapped clean in two, rang twice more on the ground, and I swear one of those pieces landed in the shape of a cross. I took that as a sign. I loaded every piece I could buy back into my car, drove it up to the deacon, and handed it over. He had it recast the next summer, and the preacher mentioned me in a sermon. I won't say whether it was kindly.
Wilkins: Junior, that bell preached more sermons in pieces than the preacher did whole. Now, you ran with the law behind you. Did metal ever give you away?
Junior: One time, and only once. I had a brass petcock on the bottom of a barrel at a setup up a hollow. A pretty little thing, polished till it looked like a gold tooth. A revenue agent was walking the ridge one night with a light, swinging it back and forth, and that petcock caught it and flashed like a lighthouse. I was laying in the laurel not twenty feet away with my heart going like a sewing machine. He looked straight at it a long while, and a possum walked out right then. He figured it was the possum's eyes shining and went on.
Wilkins: Saved by a possum. Did you thank it?
Junior: I never shot another possum as long as I lived. And the next morning I took stove polish to every brass fitting I owned and blacked them all, dull as a church pew. Copper turns brown on its own. Brass stays shiny out of pure vanity.
Wilkins: Like a Concord banker. Last one: you told me your granny could hear a lie in a coin.
Junior: Granny Vance would not take a dime from any peddler till she rang it on her cast-iron stove lid. Silver rings out clear, a bright little ting. One day a fella selling Bibles and liniment paid her change, she dropped a dime on that lid, and it went 'thup.' Dead as a doornail. Lead slug with silver wash on it. She took a roofing nail and nailed that slug right to the porch post, and she told the man he could come back and get it whenever he felt brave. He never felt brave.
Wilkins: Junior, your granny had the ears of a Treasury assayer and the temper of a snapping turtle, and I would have proposed to her. That stove lid trick is the ring test, and I will teach it proper in a minute. Junior Vance, everybody, the only man I know who paid a debt in mule.
Junior: Thank you, Doc. Tell that bear to quit looking at me.
♦ Bear grunt, long and low
Wilkins: He says no.
♪ Fiddle reel bridges into ad break
Ad Break
♪ Brassy medicine-show march, drum rolls
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♪ March ends with a cymbal crash and tuba blat
The Alloy Test, The Bear Supervisor, And The Craft
♦ Wax crackle, file rasping on metal
Wilkins: Back at the anvil. Here are the Fort Wilkins tests for any metal that comes over my wall. You need no laboratory, no professor, and no Latin, only a file, a hammer, a lodestone, a forge, and the good sense God gave a goat.
Wilkins: Test one is the MAGNET. Hold a lodestone or a horseshoe magnet to the piece. Copper, brass and bronze will not jump to it. If it grabs, you have iron dressed up in copper's Sunday clothes, plated or painted. Throw it at the peddler, and aim for the knees.
Wilkins: Test two is COLOR, but never trust the outside. Old copper turns brown, then green. Old brass turns brown, then black. Old bronze turns a chocolate color. Tarnish is a liar's coat. Take a file and cut one clean spot. Fresh copper shows a warm salmon pink, the color of a healthy gum. I say that as a dentist, and I know a good gum when I see one. Brass shows lemon yellow up to brassy gold: the more zinc, the yellower. Bronze shows a duller reddish gold, with a little brown in it.
Wilkins: Test three is the FILE BITE. This one tells hardness. On soft annealed copper the file sinks in like a spoon into butter, the teeth clog with bright pink curls, and you have to knock them out on the bench. Brass files clean and fast and sheds fine yellow dust. Hard tin-bronze makes the file skate and squeal like a pig at a fence. Every man in Merrimack County swears his rod is solid copper, and the file says otherwise for most of them.
♦ Hammer taps on three metals: a dull thunk, a bright clink, a long singing ring
Wilkins: Test four is the RING. Hang the piece on a string or balance it on one finger and tap it with a hammer. Pure copper gives that dull thunk Junior described, like a fist on a feather bed. Brass speaks up with a brighter clink. Bronze sings, long and pure, and the more tin it has, the longer the song. That is the whole reason bells are bronze. It is also the warning, because tin buys hardness and sells toughness. Bell metal, about four parts copper to one of tin, is brittle. The great bell in Philadelphia, the one they call the Liberty Bell, is a high-tin bronze, and its crack opened past mending when they rang it for Washington's Birthday in 1846. Too much tin and your metal is a beautiful singer that falls apart when you drop it, like an opera tenor at a barn raising.
Wilkins: Less tin, about nine parts copper to one, gives you gun metal. That is what the Union cast its 12-pounder Napoleons from, the bronze field guns that did so much killing at Gettysburg. Tough enough to take the powder, hard enough to hold the bore. So when a peddler brings you a lump of bronze and calls it still copper, remember it was made to be a cannon or a bell. It wants to shoot or to sing, and it will not bend into a worm without cracking.
♦ Forge bellows huffing, coals roaring
Wilkins: Test five is the FLAME, and here we are in alchemy country. Sprinkle a pinch of clean filings into a clear flame, a spirit lamp or the edge of the forge. If copper is in it, the flame takes on a green to blue-green color as pretty as an emerald. Now heat a scrap of brass hot, past a bright red. Zinc boils at a lower heat than copper melts, so it starts boiling out of the brass. Up comes a white smoke that settles as a woolly white powder. The old alchemists called it philosopher's wool, or flowers of zinc. That is zinc oxide, and you must NOT breathe it. Every brass foundry man knows brass-founders' ague: a chill, a fever, an iron taste in the mouth, and a man who breathes brass smoke shakes so hard he could churn butter in his pocket. Do that test out of doors, upwind, and quick.
Wilkins: Now, why does a still-maker care? Because the zinc in brass spoils a worm. Your worm and your still sit in hot, sour wash and hot spirit, run after run. Brass in that bath gives up its zinc a little at a time. That is called dezincification, and it is a ten-dollar word for rot. The zinc goes into your spirit, and you get Junior's fencepost-hugger and the white vitriol vomit. What is left of the brass is a spongy, porous, pinkish ghost of a metal. It looks fine until one morning it weeps vapor out of a hundred pinholes. Brass is also stiffer than annealed copper, and it cracks when you coil it tight. Brass for a doorknob, yes. Brass for a whistle, gladly. Brass in a still, NEVER. Use clean copper, and join it with silver solder or a good mechanical union.
♦ Hissing quench, followed by a bear's offended roar and a heavy splash
Wilkins: That brings us to my newest hand. Barnaby is the Fort Wilkins Cooling Supervisor. This is how I anneal copper, and it is a different animal from steel. To soften copper after hammering has made it stiff, you heat it to a dull red, the color of a drunk's nose at dusk. Then you can let it cool in the air or plunge it in water. Either way it comes out soft. Water does NOT harden copper the way it hardens a knife blade. Quenching just saves you the waiting. Then every hammer blow and every bend hardens it again, and you anneal again. Raise a still body with a hammer and you do this a dozen times.
Wilkins: I keep the quench trough under the window, inside Barnaby's chain, because I believed, God help me, that a bear would make a fine guard over a trough of water. He took the post seriously. Every time I bring a red-hot sheet out, he plants himself in front of the trough like a Methodist matron at a punch bowl: he will not let anybody near it, and he will not drink from it either. Last Tuesday I went to quench a hot collar ring and he got his head in the way. It caught him on the nose. The hiss, the stink of singed bear hair, and the roar together made a sound I can only compare to a locomotive falling into a pig farm. He knocked the trough over, sat in the mud, and pouted for an afternoon.
Wilkins: I raised his wages to two ham bones a week, and in all that time he has cooled exactly one piece of copper. He sat on it. He has not forgiven me, and the copper has a dent shaped exactly like a bear's backside, and I have sold it twice. Barnaby has been Cooling Supervisor since spring, and in that time the only thing he has cooled is my enthusiasm. He is a tall tale on a chain, friends. No sensible man keeps a bear near a forge, or anywhere else.
♪ Low fiddle drone under
Wilkins: Now the craft, from mash to jar. I am telling it as history, mind you. First the mash. Take eight pounds of cracked corn and cook it in five gallons of water until it is a thick porridge. Let it cool to about one hundred fifty degrees on a Fahrenheit thermometer, hot enough to sting a finger but not to scald it. Stir in two pounds of crushed barley malt. The malt holds a working ferment the French chemists Payen and Persoz isolated in 1833 and named diastase, which turns corn starch into sugar. Hold the mash warm and stir it now and then for an hour and a half.
Wilkins: To know when the work is done, use the doctor's trick. Put a spoon of the thin liquid on a white saucer and add a drop of iodine tincture from the medicine chest. If it turns blue-black, starch is still there and you wait. When the iodine stays brown, the starch has turned to sugar. Cool the mash to blood-warm, about eighty degrees. Pitch your yeast, cover it loosely, give it air in the room, and let it work about a week, until the bubbling stops and the cap falls.
Wilkins: Next the run. Strain the wash into a clean copper pot, bring the heat up gently, and keep it low. A rushed fire smears your cuts the way a rushed tooth-pull smears the gum. Make every joint tight. Alcohol vapor is heavier than air. It rolls out of a leaky joint, pools on the floor, and creeps toward the firebox the way a deputy creeps toward a free lunch. Many a still-house has gone up in flames from a little leak at the ankle, with the still itself standing fine. Keep a bucket of sand and a wet sack close by, and never walk away from a lit still.
Wilkins: Now the copper does its alchemy. The vapor carries sulfur stinks from the ferment, the rotten-egg and boiled-cabbage smells, and they meet bright copper in the pot, the cap, and the worm. The copper takes the sulfur and holds on to it. That is why the metal must be pure copper and clean, and why brass or a scrap of bell bronze will not do the same honest job.
Wilkins: Then the cuts. Catch the run in small jars, numbered one, two, three, never one big crock. The first trickle smells like varnish or pear drops. Pour it on the ground, where it does no harm. That is the foreshots and the heads, with nothing in them fit to drink. Methanol boils at about one hundred forty-eight degrees and good spirit at about one hundred seventy-three, but the methanol does not leave in one neat parcel. It smears through the early jars. So be generous: when you are in doubt, throw it out. When the smell turns sweet and clean and the taste is smooth, you are in the hearts. Keep them. Later, when it starts to smell like wet cardboard and a wet dog and the jar goes oily, you are into the tails. Set those aside. Let your hearts jars stand open overnight under a cloth, then smell each one fresh in the morning before you blend. Your nose is the truest instrument in the whole shop, and it is the one thing you cannot buy from a peddler.
♪ Banjo sting
The Call-In Cylinder And The Bite-Test Myth
♦ Wax crackle intensifies, a cylinder machine winding
Wilkins: We have a message cylinder all the way from North Carolina. Let us hear it.
♦ Distant hiss of a recorded cylinder
Cletus: Alchemist, my uncle swears old-timers used to throw hickory ashes or red oak shavings into the thump keg to clean out bad heads. Is there any truth to that, or was he just making swamp medicine?
♦ Cylinder clicks off
Wilkins: Rabbit Miller of Wilkesboro, Junior's own country! Rabbit, your uncle is half a chemist and half a carnival barker, and I mean that as praise of both halves. Let me take the ashes first. What is wood ash? It is potash, the same lye your granny leaches out of the hopper to boil soap. It is an alkali. Put it in your thump keg and it will soak up some of the sour, the vinegar acids a slow ferment can give, and some of that sharp bite will stay behind in the keg. That much is real. That is the grain of truth he is chewing.
Wilkins: Here is what he is not telling you. Potash meets the oily tails sitting in that hot doubler, and potash plus fat makes SOAP. Your doubler foams like a washtub and pukes suds straight up into your worm, and you get a spirit that tastes like Monday laundry. Ash in the doubler and fat in the tails make soap, and a still that foams soap is the only clean thing that ever came out of your uncle's barn. And no ash in creation pulls methanol out of vapor. The only cure for bad heads is the cut: a generous one, made by nose and jar number, poured on the ground.
Wilkins: Now the red oak shavings. Oak gives off tannin and color. Put shavings in the keg or the jar and your clear spirit comes out amber, and the peddler sells it as old whiskey. That is a lie of the eye, Rabbit. Rouge puts youth in a widow the same way: it fools the eye and nobody else. Real age comes from time in a barrel, and oak shavings cannot fix bad heads. So your uncle made half medicine and half theater. Tell him Wilkins says to keep his ashes for the soap kettle and his shavings for kindling. Rabbit, God bless you, and keep the cylinders coming.
♦ Steel punch clangs on copper coin
Wilkins: That is a fresh G. G. WILKINS on an old copper large cent. It took the punch deep as a well, Rabbit, and it is yours if you are ever up the turnpike.
Wilkins: Now an old myth: biting a coin to test it. You have seen men do it in every tavern from Portsmouth to Plymouth. They clamp a gold piece in their teeth and look wise. The idea is that pure gold is soft and shows a dent. Fine. But a gilded lead slug is soft too, softer than gold, and it passes the bite test with honors. All the bite tells you is that the metal is soft, and the man biting it is softer still in the head.
♦ Steel punch clangs on copper coin
Wilkins: And here is what the dentist knows. I have pulled more molars from coin-biters than from candy-eaters, and the candy-eaters at least enjoyed the cause. A hard Indian cent or a silver dollar against a back tooth that has been chewing tobacco for thirty years cracks the tooth from crown to root, like splitting a cord of oak. Biting a coin is a fine way to tell soft gold from hard lies, and a finer way to make an appointment with me. Ring it on a stove lid like Granny Vance, weigh it on a scale, or file the edge. Leave your teeth out of the assay office.
♦ Steel punch clangs on copper coin
Wilkins: One more myth, and it is the dearest one: 'brass is near enough copper, it is mostly copper anyhow.' Mostly copper is like mostly sober. Forty parts zinc in a hundred is a great deal of zinc in your worm, and we have heard tonight where it ends up: in a fencepost-hugger in Moravian Falls. If it files yellow, it stays out of the still.
♪ Fiddle and banjo swell
Sign-Off
♦ Wax crackle, fire burning low
Announcer: A quick word before goodnight! Copper keeps your spirit honest, and Moonshine Stills keeps your copper sealed: Heavy-Duty Tri-Clamp Ferrules and Gaskets, thirty-four ninety-five, with a showroom at Fort Wilkins on Route 28. Shop hardware at moonshinestill.com!
Wilkins: Thank you, sir. And friends, if tonight gave you a taste for metal and fire, sign up for the Alchemist G. G. Wilkins Distilling Course. I will teach you to read copper, make clean cuts, keep a safe fire, and spot a Pinchbeck Peddler from a hundred yards. A gasket of flour paste is like a promise from a Concord selectman: it holds until the heat comes up, and my course will teach you better than both. My thanks to Junior Vance, who paid a debt in mule and saved a church bell, and to Rabbit Miller of Wilkesboro, whose uncle is still welcome to my soap kettle.
♦ Bear grunt outside, chain clink
Wilkins: Barnaby says goodnight, and he wants it on the record that he resigns as Cooling Supervisor, effective at once, without notice and without returning the ham bones.
Wilkins: Keep your copper clean, your cuts honest, and your fire low. Goodnight from Fort Wilkins.
♦ Bear grunt and final drip into jar
♪ 1860s parlor banjo and mountain fiddle theme with antique warmth, fading into wax cylinder crackle