"Yes, five minutes; and it seemed a good deal longer."
Five minutes struggling in a sort of stone trap, stretched out helpless at the very top of a steeple where one false move would mean destruction—that is what Merrill spoke of as a funny thing! Thanks, I thought, I will take my fun some other way, and lower down.
"You would be surprised," he went on, "to feel the movement of a steeple. It trembles all the time, and answers every jar on the street below. I guess old Trinity's steeple sways eighteen inches every time an elevated train passes. And St. Paul's is even worse. Why, she rocks like a beautifully balanced cradle; it would make some people seasick. Perhaps you don't know it, but the better a steeple is built the more she sways. You want to look out for the ones that stand rigid; there's something wrong with them—most likely they're out of plumb."
"Isn't there danger," I asked, "that a steeple may get swaying too much, say in a gale, and go clear over?"
"Gale or not," said Merrill, "a well-made steeple must rock in the wind, the same as a tree rocks. That is the way it takes the storm, by yielding to it. If it didn't yield it would probably break. Why, the great shaft of the Washington Monument sways four or five feet when the wind blows hard."
Then he explained that modern steeples are built with a steel backbone (if I may so call it) running down from the top for many feet inside the stonework. At Trinity, for instance, this backbone (known as a dowel) is four inches thick and forty-five feet long, a great steel mast stretching down through the cross, down inside the heavy stones and ornaments, and ending in massive beams and braces where the steeple's greater width gives full security.
"What sort of work did you do on these steeples?" I asked.
"All kinds; stone-mason's work, painter's work, blacksmith's work, carpenter's work—why, a good steeple-climber has to know something about 'most every trade. It's painting flagpoles, and scraping off shale from a steeple's sides, and repairing loose stones and ornaments, and putting up lightning-rods, and gilding crosses, and cleaning smoke-stacks so high that it makes you dizzy to look up, let alone looking down, and a dozen other things. Sometimes we have to take a whole steeple down, beginning at the top, stone by stone—unless it's a wooden steeple, and then we burn her down five or six feet at a time, with creosote painted around where you want the fire to stop; the creosote puts it out. Once I blew off the whole top of a steeple with dynamite; and, by the way, I'll tell you about that some time."
Conversing with a steeple-climber (when he feels like telling things) is like breathing oxygen; you find it over-stimulating. In ten minutes' matter-of-fact talking he opens so many vistas of thrilling interest that you stand before them bewildered. He starts to answer one question, and you burn to interrupt him with ten others, each of which will lead you hopelessly away from the remaining nine.