CHARLIE’S THEODOLITE.
It was now the latter part of winter; the snow was deep; Charlie began
to think about cutting his mast, main boom, and bowsprit. He did not at
first contemplate having anything above the top-gallant sail; but when
Sally came home and related her conversation with Mrs. Yelf, Ben said,
“Charlie you must gratify the old lady; it would be bad luck and a sin
not to do so.”
“But, father, there is no sail that she could weave cloth enough for.”
“Well, then you must have one on purpose for her; have a flying royal;
there will be no braces, the sheets will make fast to the top-gallant
yard, it will furl right in with the top-gallant sail, the yard will
be underneath the top-gallant stay and when the yard hoists up, the
stay will go with it; it will be a little thing, not more than forty or
forty-five yards: she can do that well enough.”
The lower mast was no less than twenty-eight inches in diameter when
made, and eighty feet long. This required a tree of great size; there
was no such one left in the lot from which the boys were to cut their
timber, and they were obliged to buy one. The bowsprit, which was
shorter, and the boom, which, though seventy-five feet in length, was
much smaller, they could obtain on their own lot. There were trees
enough on the island of much larger size; but those enormous trees,
that would make a thirty-six inch mast for a man-of-war Ben didn’t like
to cut, now that the pressure of poverty was removed.
It would have been a great deal of work for Charlie to have gone on to
his own land, broken a road through the deep snow to the back end of
his lot to obtain it; then, to tow so large a stick six miles would
have been a great undertaking in the winter time.
“Charlie,” said Ben, “there’s a tree stands a couple of rods to the
north-east of the big pine that has the eagle’s nest on it, large
enough to make your mast. There’s a short crook in it near the top; if
it is long enough below that, I will sell it to you cheap, because the
crook spoils it for a mast for a ship of the line, though it is large
enough otherwise: let us go and look at it.”
When they came to view it, Ricker, who was a man of great experience in
the woods, thought it was long enough; Ben thought it was not; Charlie
didn’t presume to give an opinion, but his knowledge of surveying
helped him out of the difficulty. “I’ll measure it,” he said.
“You can’t climb it,” said Ben, “and there’s no scrubby tree to fall on
to it, to climb: how are you going to measure it?”
The ground around was level; Charlie made a mark on the tree where it
was to be cut off, then measured a distance from it equal to the length
of his mast, and drove down a stake; then cut two straight ash sprouts,
one two feet, the other one foot long, found the middle of the longest,
made a hole in it with the point of his jackknife, whittled the end of
the short one to a wedge, and stuck it into it. He now got down on his
hands and knees at the stake, held the short stick as nearly level with
the mark on the butt of the tree as possible, then sighted over the
ends of the two sticks; his eye struck the tree a short distance below
the crook.
“It’s a snug rub, but I guess ’twill go; cut it down. I’ll risk it.”
Ricker and John soon brought the great tree to the ground, when it was
found to be seven inches longer than required. These two ash sprouts
were Charlie’s theodolite, and answered his purpose as well as one that
would cost two hundred dollars.
“Well done, my boy,” said Ben, who had watched the operation with great
interest. “That’s a capital application of the principle that the two
sides of a right-angled triangle are equal.”
“I could have hit it exactly if I had brought a plumb line, to have
taken a true level of the base.”
The reason that Charlie made the perpendicular stick longer than the
other was, that he might get his eye down to sight at the trunk of the
tree; otherwise he must have dug a hole in the ground.