“You have? Then, Charlie, you must build another for me, right off, just like her.”
“I will do that, sir, for I have got stuff enough to make the keel, stern, and transom, all sawed out, and crooks for timbers. I’ll begin to-morrow; that is, if father can spare me.”
“I’ll paint her, and make the spars and sails. Uncle Isaac wants you to build him one: he would build one himself, but he can’t get the time. He expects to go over to Wiscasset, to work on spars, and is driving on to get his work at home done.”
“Does he want her the same dimensions as this one?”
“Yes; but he is in no hurry for her; you’ll have boats enough to build, Charlie; so you had better lay out for it.”
“I shouldn’t dare to build a boat for Uncle Isaac.”
“Why not?”
“Because, he’s such a neat workman himself, I’m afraid I shouldn’t suit him.”
“I’ll risk you; you’ll suit him to a hair, and ’twill be a feather in your cap to work for him.”
Such a thing as a wood-shed did not exist at Elm Island; indeed, there was not the necessity then for many things that are now really necessary. There were always plenty of dry limbs and trunks of trees in the woods to start the fire with, and the tremendous heat generated in one of those old fireplaces (with a log four feet long and three feet thick, a back-stick on that half the size, and a fore-stick eight feet long), would burn green red oak, and even black ash, when once fairly under way. When dry wood was wanted, Ben or Charlie would go into the woods and soon find a tall pine which had been dead for years, the bark all fallen off, and nearly all the limbs, and streaked with pitch, which had exuded and hardened in the sun on the outside. Laid low by the axe, the top would be broken into many pieces, thus rendering the cutting up a light labor. To be sure, when hauled to the door, it lay in summer exposed to all the rains, and in winter half buried in snow. But what did that matter. When night came, Charlie filled the great oven—which, being in the back, was always nearly hot enough to bake—with this pine, and great clefts of green beech, which in the course of the night would get warm, and a little dry on the outside. In the morning there would be a bushel of live coals on the hearth, the remains of the old log. Raking them forward, on go the green log and back-stick, the green fore-stick, dry pine, half pitch, on top of the glowing coals, top of that the clefts of beech, and perhaps a dry bush crowns the summit.