The boys helped him lift up the hoop, tuck in the straw, and shovel in the apples, with right good will. Planks were now placed upon the cheese, and some short blocks of timber on them, when the cider began to run from the edges through the straw, and was led by a gutter, which ran round the platform, into a half-hogshead tub.
Uncle Isaac now sat down to rest, and eat an apple, while the boys, providing themselves with straws, began to suck the cider from the gutter as though their lives depended on their diligence. Every once in a while you would hear a long-drawn sigh as they stopped to take breath. As the cheese had now settled together, and become a little firm, Uncle Isaac prepared to press it.
This is done nowadays with a screw, but it was not the fashion then. He had a white oak beam forty feet in length and ten inches square; one end of this enormous stick was placed in a mortise cut in the tree, the other on a horse. The stick extending over the middle of the cheese, a pair of shears and a tackle were placed at the end, and Uncle Isaac and the boys hoisted up the end of the great beam, took the horse away, and let the beam come down on the cheese, not very hard at first, but gradually; this set the cider running at a great rate. As the cheese settled, he lifted the beam and put under more blocks, and at length he and the boys piled great rocks on the end of the beam, and got on themselves, till they squat it dry.
Nothing would do but they must stop to supper; Uncle Isaac would not hear to their going home.
“Only think,” whispered Fred to John, “if we had succeeded in killing Uncle Isaac’s orchard last spring, I shouldn’t have been sucking cider and eating apples to-day.”
“I’ve heard mother say,” was the reply, “that a person couldn’t injure another without injuring himself, and I believe it.”
John told Uncle Isaac that Charles had cut down one of the biggest pines on the island, and made a float, oars and all, made an axe-handle, and caught three hundred weight of codfish.
When they went home, Uncle Isaac told the boys to fill their pockets with apples, and gave Charles a bag full and a jug of cider to carry to the island.
John and Charles slept together, and lay awake and talked half the night, laying plans for the future.
“I’ll tell you what you can do, Charles; you can make a paddle, and cut a scull-hole in your canoe, and she’ll make a first-rate gunning float.”