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| Mary Snyder Behrens © 1986 |
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H.H. Green, Simple Life of a Commoner, 1911—
But of all the things I saw that day, there was one that so deeply interested me that I have never forgotten its exact appearance. It was a wonder to a boy of my age and would be of considerable interest even now. It was just a common ordinary pocket knife with a bone handle and blades of steel, but it contained 1,851 [because it was made to be shown for the first time at the Crystal Palace Exhibition in London, the first World's Fair, in 1851] of those steel blades, from one to two feet long and proportionally wide and thick, on down of all sorts and sizes till the smallest could not have been more than a quarter of an inch long. They were all open from the handle and stood out in all directions like the quills on a porcupine's back when he is on a war footing. Up to that time that was the greatest sight I had even seen. I have often thought since, if that knife had been lost for a thousand years and then found by some antiquarian, what a time the wiseacres might have had ever the monstrous size of a man, who, in the middle of the nineteenth century carried a pocket knife like that.
