“It’s something I invented,” he hollered at me, “and you’re so fresh you nearly knocked it in the lake. Did I say I’d give you a shot?”
“Come on, let’s row over to him,” I said to Dub. “I’d rather jolly him along than catch sunfish.” That’s my favorite outdoor sport, jollying Pee-wee.
So we rowed over just under the springboard and I caught hold of one of his legs so the boat wouldn’t drift. “What is it anyway?” I asked him. “Let’s look at it.”
“It’s a windmeter,” he said.
“A which?” I asked him.
“It’s for telling which way the wind blows,” he said, “and I’m going to see if I can sell a lot of them. Maybe the Boy Scouts of America could use them and maybe they’ll get advertised in Boys’ Life.”
“They don’t care which way the wind blows,” I told him. “Let’s look at it.”
Oh boy, that was some invention. I’m glad Edison never saw it or he’d have died from jealousy. It was a long, thin bottle, maybe about ten inches long; Dub Smedley said a tooth-brush came in it. There were a lot of crinkly strips of confetti all different colors fixed to the cork; the ends of the strips were bound together and fixed to the cork with a pin. It was kind of like a comet only smaller. It was quite a little smaller. The way you did was to stick the cork in the bottle and hold on to the bottle and let the confetti all fly loose. Then, you could tell what way the wind was blowing. You moved it around in your fingers like a compass till the confetti blew straight out and then you knew that the closed up end of the bottle was pointed the way the wind wasn’t blowing. And the other end was pointing the way the wind was blowing. When you wanted to put that wonderful instrument in your pocket you just stuffed the confetti into the bottle and put the cork in that way. There were three or four matches in the bottle and a lightning bug in case the matches wouldn’t work. There was a cricket too and there was a hole in the cork so the wild animals could breathe.
“What’s the cricket for?” I asked the kid.
“Will you let go my leg?” he shouted. “Do you think I’m a mooring buoy or something?”