"I think I could put in the old rounds without taking the chairs apart," said Phaeton; "and if you'll let me, I'll take one home and try it."
"Try what you like," said Aunt Mercy. "You can't make them look any worse than they do now."
So Phaeton took up one of the ancient chairs, inverted it and placed it on his head as the easiest way of carrying it, and marched home.
His next care was to secure the missing rounds. He came over to our house and got the rope-ladder, and then went to the police-station and had the good fortune to recover the piece which the over-shrewd policeman had carried off as evidence. This gave him the whole twenty-four rounds, and it did not take him long to select from them the four that had been sawed from the particular chair which he had in hand. Ned and I had done our work hurriedly, and somewhat roughly, and no two were sawed precisely alike. We had sawed them so that stubs, perhaps an inch long, were left sticking out from the legs.
Phaeton procured a fine saw, and sawed one of the rounds in two, lengthwise, thus splitting it in halves, each of which, of course, had one flat side and one curved side.
Then he sawed in each of the two stubs which had originally been parts of that same round, a notch, or "shoulder," which cut away about half of the stub,—the upper side of one and the lower side of the other,—carefully saving the pieces that came out of the notches.
Then he put the two halves of the round together, as they were before being sawed apart,—except that he slid them by each other, lengthwise, a distance equal to the length of the notches in the stubs.
| HOW THE CHAIR WAS MENDED. |
Now, as he held the reconstructed round in its place in the chair, it just fitted, and there was sufficient overlap on the stubs to make a secure fastening possible. Near each end there was a small vacant space, into which the pieces that had been cut out to make the notches in the stubs exactly fitted.