Boring.
Georgie was still after this, for he knew that his father would do as he said; but he soon found out other means of making trouble besides noise. He and the other boys went to one of the carpenters, who was boring a hole, and he began to beg the carpenter to let him take the auger and bore it.
“I can bore,” said he.
“I see you can,” said the carpenter, “but I wish you would not come here and bore me.”
The other carpenters who were near laughed at hearing this, and Georgie, not liking to be laughed at, walked away to another part of the work. Here he began to ask questions, such as what this beam was for, and what tenon was going into that mortice, and whether such and such a hole was not bored wrong. All these questions interrupted the workmen, confused them in their calculations, and hindered the work. At last, Georgie’s father told him not to ask any more questions, but to keep perfectly still.
He and the other boys make a balancer.
His father would, in fact, have sent him away entirely, were it not that he was wanted from time to time to do an errand, or fetch a tool. These errands, however, he did very slowly and reluctantly, so that he was of little service. Finally, he proposed to the boys that they should make a balancer, and they did so. They put up one short beam of wood upon another, and then, placing a plank across, two of the boys got on, one at each end, and began see-sawing up and down. This was their balancer.
“Isn’t it good fun,” said Georgie, as he went up into the air, “to have a raising?”
“Yes,” said the other boy, who was then down by the ground.
“I hope they won’t get through to-night,” said Georgie, coming down, “and then we can have some more fun to-morrow.”