[STRANDED ON A CHIMNEY.]
"Unravel your stocking, John; begin at the toe," was a sentence which many an old-time schoolboy learned well, for it appeared in the school readers of a generation ago. It was the solution found by a quick-witted wife for the problem of rescuing her husband from the top of a tall chimney. When he had let down an end of a raveling, she tied a piece of string to it, and eventually sent him up a rope.
Something of the same sort happened not long ago to two chimney builders on Staten Island, N. Y.
They were up on the top of a big new concrete chimney, over one hundred and sixty feet tall, and started to complete their job by tearing away the scaffolding on the inside as they worked down. There was a ladder running all the way down. The men stood on some planks about ten feet down from the top. They ripped up the planks one by one, and shot them down inside the shaft.
The next to the last one, however, went a little crooked, glanced from the wall, hit the ladder, and in a twinkling tore several sections out and left the men standing on a single plank, six feet long and two feet wide, with no means of going up or down.
It was then noon, and for more than four hours they alternately whistled and shouted in a vain attempt to attract attention. It was nearly five o'clock when another workman happened to come into the chimney at the bottom and heard their cries.
A crowd quickly gathered, and began to wonder what they could do to help. Meanwhile, the prisoners had not been idle: they had torn their flannel shirts to narrow strips and made a rope of them, and this they sent down the chimney slowly.
Firemen were soon at hand, and attached a light line to the improvised rope, and sent it up. The chief's idea was that if they threw it over the top of the chimney and let it down to the ground, he could anchor it there, and they could safely slide down the inside.
They threw it over the top, but there it stuck, fastened in the soft concrete, and soon they could neither pull it toward them nor pay it out; yet they dared not trust their weight on it. For some time the rescue was halted, but at last another rope was secured, and with the line already in hand this was hauled up and thrown over the chimney rim. It went without sticking, and was secured on the outside.