red, and worn
out, with their hard rubbing against the sides of the cracks. At last, I
told him I had a very hard kind of wood, and I gave him a piece of
ebony. He made it into a wedge, and, after that, he had no more
difficulty. He said his ebony wedge was just like iron."

"Was it really as hard as iron?" asked Marco.

"Oh, no," said Forester,--"but it was much harder than any wood which he
could get. He thought it was a very curious wood. He had never seen any
like it before."

"I should like some ebony," said Marco.

"Ebony would be an excellent wood to make a top of," said Forester, "it
is so hard and heavy."

"I should like to have a top hard," said Marco, "but I don't think it
would be any better for being heavy."

"Yes," said Forester; "the top would spin longer. The heavier a top is,
the longer it will spin."

"Then I should like a top made of lead," said Marco.

"It would spin very long," said Forester, "if it was well made, though
it would require more strength to set it a-going well. But lead would be
soft, and thus would easily get bruised and indented. Besides, black
would be a prettier color for a top than lead color. A jet black top,
well polished, would be very handsome."

"Is black a color?" asked Marco. "I read in a book once that black and
white were not colors."

"There are two meanings to the word color," said Forester. "In one
sense, black is a color, and in another sense, it is not. For instance,
if a lady were to go into a shop, and ask for some morocco shoes for a
little child, and they were to show her some black ones, she might say
she did not want black ones; she wanted colored ones. In that sense,
black would not be a color.

"On the other hand," continued Forester, "she might ask for silk
stockings, and if the shopkeeper were to ask her what color she wanted,
she might say black. In that sense, black would be a color."

"Which is the right sense?" asked Marco.

"Both are right," said Forester. "When a word is commonly used in two
senses, both are correct. The philosophers generally consider black not
to be a color; that is, they generally use the word in the first sense."

"Why?" asked Marco.

"For this reason," replied Forester. He was going on to explain the
reason, when suddenly Marco's attention was attracted by the sight of a
long raft of logs, which was coming down the river. They had been riding
at some distance from the river, and out of sight of it, but now it c