"Now teach me your song, Canary," said Maud with the roguish eyes,
"And when father comes home with mother, I'll give them such a surprise;
They'll think I am you, Canary, and wonder what set you free,
And nearly die a-laughing, when they find it is only me.
Teach me your song, Canary; I'll whistle it if I can;
Now open your throat, dear Tiptoe, and sing like a little man."
Tiptoe, the pretty fellow, cocked up his bright black eye,
As if to say, "Little mistress, it will do you no harm to try."
Then taking some slight refreshments, and polishing off his bill,
Broke into a rapture of singing that ended off with a trill;
And Maud, with her head bent forward, sat listening to his lay,
And fast as he sang, she whistled, till gathered the twilight gray.
Then she crept down to the parlor as quietly as a mouse:
The maids were in the kitchen, and no one else in the house.
And when the key in the doorway the dear little mischief heard,
She whistled away so sweetly, they thought it was surely the bird.
Hither and thither she flitted, behind the sofa and chairs;
Her mother cried, "Mercy, Edward! the bird! Is the cat down stairs?"
Wildly they stared around them, till, "It's me, it is me, papa!"
Said Maud, from her corner springing. Ah, then what a loud "Ha! ha!"
Rang through the room. Her father, convulsed, on the sofa sat.
Gravely appeared among them their sober old pussy cat.
Maud merrily laughed and shouted, "A cunning old cat like you—
To think you should mistake me for a little canary too!"
MODEL YACHT-BUILDING.
A SLOOP-YACHT.
The boat here described is a model of a sloop-yacht of about fifteen tons measurement, forty-four feet long, and fifteen feet beam; the model, on a scale of half an inch to the foot, being consequently twenty-two inches long, on the water-line, and seven and a half inches wide. The wood should be a block of clear dry pine, twenty-five inches long, seven and a half inches wide, and five inches thick, the sides being first planed square; then on one of the five-inch sides lines are drawn two inches apart across the block; the water-line (W L, Fig. 2) is drawn two inches and thirteen-sixteenths from the top at the end selected for the bow, and two inches and five-sixteenths at the stern; the stern-post (s t) is laid off, and the outer line of the stern (t f); and finally the curved lines a f and a v are drawn, completing what is called the sheer plan.
In copying from the drawings it must be kept in mind that they are exactly one-fourth the full size, so that any distance taken from them with the dividers must be laid off four times on the block.
To copy the curved lines, their distance from some line, as A B or W L, is measured on each of the two-inch lines, by which a number of points on the curve are found, and a line drawn as nearly as possible through all of them by means of a flexible ruler, held in place by pins.
The block must now be cut away to the outline a f t s v, after which lines two inches apart are drawn on the top, the line A B drawn entirely around the block in the centre of the top, bottom, and ends, and Fig. 1 drawn on top, both halves being of course the same.
The block is next cut to the line a b c d, Fig. 1, the widest part being, not on deck, but along the line c d, as there is some "tumble home" from b to the stern.
The outline of the deck is a b e f, the stern being a segment of a circle of five inches radius.