"The lath boards," continued Forester, "are sometimes made narrow, and nailed on at a little distance from each other, and sometimes they are wide boards, split up, but not taken apart, and then the cracks, which are made in splitting them, are forced open when the boards are nailed on. The way they do it, is this. They put the wide lath board down upon a plank, and make a great many cracks in it with an axe. Then they put it upon the wall, or ceiling, and nail one edge. Then they take a wedge and drive into one of the cracks, and force it open far enough to let the plastering in. Then they put in some more nails, in such a manner as to keep that crack open. Then they wedge open another crack, and nail again; and so on, until they have nailed on the whole board, so as to leave the cracks all open."
"And you made the carpenter an ebony wedge?" said Marco.
"Yes," said Forester. "He had had wedges made of the hardest wood that he could get, but they would soon become bruised, and battered, and worn out, with their hard rubbing against the sides of the cracks. At last, I told him I had a very hard kind of wood, and I gave him a piece of ebony. He made it into a wedge, and, after that, he had no more difficulty. He said his ebony wedge was just like iron."
"Was it really as hard as iron?" asked Marco.
"Oh, no," said Forester,—"but it was much harder than any wood which he could get. He thought it was a very curious wood. He had never seen any like it before."
"I should like some ebony," said Marco.
"Ebony would be an excellent wood to make a top of," said Forester, "it is so hard and heavy."
"I should like to have a top hard," said Marco, "but I don't think it would be any better for being heavy."
"Yes," said Forester; "the top would spin longer. The heavier a top is, the longer it will spin."