“Get married.”
“Well, so I do, awfully.”
“Then,” said John, “why don’t you do it?”
“Yes,” said Fred. “It’s a leisure time now: the snow is about gone, and we’ll all turn to and put you up a log house in no time.”
“That’s it, Charlie. Come, you are the oldest; set a good example: I’ll raise the crew. Fred wants to follow suit.”
“I’m a good mind to build a log house before I go to Portland;” which resolution was the result of many previous conversations with Mary Rhines, in which they had determined to begin, as Ben and Sally, Joe Griffin and his wife, had done. The boys took good care not to let his resolution cool, but instantly set off, post-haste, for Captain Rhines’s, where they found Ben, Sally, and Uncle Isaac, and, taking them aside, commended the affair to them. Uncle Isaac needed no prompting, and in a fortnight the house was built, differing in no wise from Joe’s, except that it had a chimney and glazed windows, which Captain Rhines declared they should have: he said the bricks and the windows would do for another house.
John now started for Portland, and Charlie for Stroudwater, in order to earn all he could before settling down. He was never satisfied unless he could be making some improvement. In Portland (on his way to Stroudwater) he saw a vessel that had put in for a harbor. It was built for a privateer in the war, and of a most beautiful model.
He ascertained her proportions, and, after he went to work at Stroudwater, amused himself with trying to imitate her with a block of wood, making a half model, and got so much interested that he went into Portland to compare his work with the original, till he got it as accurate as possible; then he put a stem, keel, and stern-post on, and painted it, intending to give it to Bennie for a plaything, and, putting it up on a brace in the shop, thought no more about it; but one stormy day, sitting in the shop, and thinking about the proportions of a vessel he had been at work upon, his eye fell upon the model. A new idea was instantly suggested; he leaped from his seat, took square and compass, divided the model accurately into pieces an inch in thickness from stem to stern, then took a fine saw, and sawed it all up. He then planed a board smooth, fastened the keel, stem, and stern-post of his model on to it, placed inside of them the blocks corresponding to the forward, after, and midship frames, and several others between them, and fastened them to the board; he found he could, by placing his square on these blocks, obtain a water-line along her side, follow the model, shape his vessel accurately, and know just what kind of a vessel he was going to have when he was done. Here was an end to his sweeps on the beach, tumbling in timbers, and guessing, to a great extent. He had got a skeleton model, the latest improvement till the present one of close models.
While he was contemplating his work, Mr. Foss came along: he showed it to him. The old carpenter saw it in a moment.
“Charlie,” said he, “you’ve made a great improvement. I undertook to learn you, and you have learned me. That’s a great thing: that’s going to save money, time, and timber. With the rising line and shortening line, you can model and build a vessel, and know what you are going to do. I’ll give you the dimensions of this vessel we are getting the timber for, and I want you to make a model of her.”