When the button was finished, Stuyvesant looked in Phonny’s nail-box to find a large screw, and when he had found one, he took the screw-driver and went out to the hen-house and screwed the button on. When the screw was driven home to its place, Stuyvesant shut the door and buttoned it. Then standing before it with his screw-driver in his hand, he surveyed his work with another look of satisfaction, and said,
“There! there are two good jobs done.”
He then opened and shut his two doors, both the large and the small one, to see once more whether they worked well. They did work perfectly well, so he turned away and went back toward the shop again, saying,
“Now for the ladder.”
He went back to the shop and entered cautiously as before. He found that Phonny had bored quite a number of holes, and was now engaged in cutting his wire into lengths. He used for this purpose a pair of cutting-plyers, as they are called, an instrument formed much like a pair of nippers. The instrument was made expressly for cutting off wire.
Stuyvesant came to the place where Phonny was at work, and stood near him a few minutes looking on. He perceived that the holes were not in a straight line, nor were they equidistant from each other. He, however, said nothing about it, but soon went to his own work again.
He took the piece of wood which he had selected to make his cross-bars of, and began to consider how many cross-bars he could make from it.
“What is that piece of wood for?” asked Phonny.
“It is for the cross-bars of my ladder,” said Stuyvesant.
“The cross-bars of a ladder ought to be round,” said Phonny. “They always make them round. In fact they call them rounds.”