In the first place, it looks like an ordinary pair of scissors. But when you open them to cut anything, you get the first surprise: one of the blades is marked off in inches, half-inches, quarters, eighths, and sixteenths.
Then when you are prepared for the wonders these shears have to show, you find that on one handle is a hammer-head, and that they can be used as a hammer. Close to the hammer-head a screw-driver is arranged. At the point of the shears is an awl for boring holes; and, most practical of all, the scissors when they are opened out form a perfect carpenter's square.
This wonderful tool was invented by Benjamin Ford, of Newcastle, Maine. Any boy who has such a pair of shears, and a paper of screws in his pocket, can build and make to his heart's content, and the happy mother who has this tool on her work-table is done forever with breaking her back over the tool-chest, to find some particularly elusive screw-driver or gimlet.

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