“Ask him yourself. I’ll risk your spoiling the stuff. If you do, there’s plenty more where that came from.”
Charlie asked for and obtained the joist. As he didn’t want Joe to look at and criticise him, when he saw him coming from the woods to his meals, he put it up chamber. At length he finished making it. Then he scraped it with a scraper made of a piece of saw-plate, and then rubbed it with dogfish skin, which made all the curls and veins in the wood to show, and put it in the front room for Ben and Joe to see when they came in to dinner.
“If I only had,” said Charles, “some dye-stuff, how handsome I could make this look!”
Joe told him there was a little red ochre in the schooner, which he would get for him. This Charles mixed with vinegar, and rubbed a little on the wood, which brought out the beauty of the wood, and gave it a nice color.
“If I were you, Charlie,” said Ben, “I would have a sacking bottom to your bed, instead of bare cords.”
“What is that?”
“Why, there is a piece of canvas that was torn from one of the sails, take that, and make it almost large enough to fill up the bedstead; then hem it, and make a row of eyelet-holes all around the edges, and cord it tight into the bedstead. It will be first rate to sleep on.”
“Ben, shew Charles how to sew with a sailor’s thimble, which is held in the hollow of the hand;” and he made it and put it in.
Fred now came over, and Charles taught him to set up and make a basket. He made a good many, and burnt them up in the fire, till at length he made one that would do. After this he got along very well.
The two boys now began to fire at a mark, as Fred had brought some powder and shot, and a gun with him. Charles, at first, shut up both eyes when he fired, and almost dropped the gun when it went off, and was afraid it would kick; and Fred could show him as much about shooting as he could Fred about basket-making; but he soon got so that he could fire without winking, and hold the gun firm to his shoulder, and hit a mark quite well. Then they took a block of wood, and made it in the shape of a Whistler, and anchored it in the water, and fired at that, as it was bobbing up and down in the water; and at length Charles got so he could hit that twice out of four times. When they had expended their ammunition, they took, instead of shot, peas and gravel-stones.