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Ankle-deep in oak shavings in the carpenter shop, I sometimes talked with and listened to an old carpenter. He chewed tobacco with such vigor that his blond walrus mustache was constantly in motion. Now and again he became motionless, tilted back his head as if to unmask a battery concealed in that brush of whisker hair, and fired a charge of brown juice at whatever target he had fixed his eyes upon. One day when I complained to him, for about the hundredth time, of night-shift men who borrowed tools and never brought them back, he pulled a sack aside and showed me an unfinished chest of just the proper size for tools.

"It's for you," he said. It took him several months to find enough time to complete that box to his satisfaction and mine, but meanwhile I had been etching my initials on all my tools.

I had read in The Scientific American how you could do that; first putting asphalt paint on the surface to be marked, then cutting out the desired pattern and finally applying acid. I sent ten cents to the magazine for a little bottle of asphalt paint and almost from the day it came all my tools were branded "W. P. C." in acid.