“Yes, the line that frames the drop,” explained Ted, “that’s the finest substance we can get, and it’s cobweb.”
Nora peered through the telescope. She was seeing a drop of alcohol shift from level to level as Ted moved the transit, but she was thinking of the night she discovered the cobwebs in the attic. Somehow attic fancies clung to her, tenaciously, and had she been at all superstitious she surely would have called the attic unlucky. Just see the trouble that Fauntleroy acting got her into.
“It wouldn’t take many webs to make such tiny marks,” she said finally, as Ted moved off to “spot a tree.” “I guess I won’t have to gather many for Cousin Jerry for that little marking.”
Ted had moved off and with her small hatchet was hacking a piece out of the bark of a tree—spotting it, as she termed it. Then she returned to the telescope and sought the level.
“What’s the little weight on the string?” Nora next asked.
“Oh, that’s our plumb-bob,” replied the surveyor. “Bob shows us just when a line is straight. Now watch.”
Over a peg in the ground Ted swung the heavy little pendulum, first to right then to the left, and so on until it fell directly on the mark.
“Now see, that is plumb,” said Ted.
Nora gazed intently at the drop. “Everything has to be just exactly, hasn’t it?” she queried, wondering why. “First, you strain your alcohol with cobwebs, then you drop your bob on the little peg straight as the string——”
“That is just where we get the expression from,” her companion assured her. “Nothing can be straighter.”