 it got down?"

Jose moved his position and Harry examined the hole. "About an eighth
of an inch," he said. "Let us scrape the dust out of it."

"Shall we take a spell now, Harry?" Bertie said.

"No, we will wait five minutes and then go on again, and after that we
will change places with you, relieving each other every twenty minutes."

The work went on, and at the end of two hours the hole was three inches
deep. Another hour and a half and the drill suddenly went down.

"We are through it," Bertie said, "and I am not sorry."

"Now I will lift the drill up gently, Bertie; do you kneel down, and
when I stop, take hold of it close to the floor, so that we may see the
thickness of the stone."

"Five inches," he said as he measured it. "Now put on a little grease,
Dias. I will lower it again, and we shall be perhaps able then to get
some idea of what is underneath."

He lowered the drill and turned it round two or three times, and then
carefully raised it. Some sand and little stones were sticking to it.

"Sand and gravel," he said. "That settles that point. Now we have done
a good morning's work, and let us go up and have breakfast."

Maria looked enquiringly at them. "I was just coming down for you.
Well, what have you done?"

"We have drilled one hole, Maria, and none of us have got our fingers
smashed, so I think we have every reason to be satisfied with our first
experience at the work."

As they breakfasted they talked matters over. Harry said that he was
certain that the thickness of the stone was not sufficient for them to
break it up by blasting. "We shall have to try some other plan. It is
equally certain that we cannot smash the stone with the sledge-hammers,
and I don't think that the wedges would break it. Of course if we got
one stone out it would be comparatively easy to lift the next, as we
could put the crowbars under it. If we can do it in no other way, we
must drill a line of holes close to each other right across the stone,
and we might then break off the piece between them and the crack and
get 