"Why, what a high steeple!" said Ben to himself, as he stopped below the Cotton Exchange, and gazed admiringly at the lofty but slender spire of the handsome church directly opposite.
Now it is a curious fact that if you stand still in the street, and begin to look intently at anything, some one else is sure to stop and stare in the same direction, as though people generally had an interrogation point for a sort of mental birth-mark. And Ben had hardly fixed his gaze on the tall spire, when two gentlemen came to a halt and began to look the same way.
"I thought you took the contract to regild the ball and arrow up there, Miles," Ben finally heard one of them say, with a nod of his head toward the weather-vane.
"So I did," returned Mr. Miles, who was a "boss" painter, "and a nice fix I'm in about it, too."
"How so?" asked the other, as, bringing his gaze earthward, he leaned up against the iron fence, and lit a cigar.
"Well," answered Mr. Miles, following his friend's example, "it's this way: I contracted to have the thing done for so much. I supposed, of course, that the vane could be sent down, like any other, and gilded, and had my best man go up to see to it. He worked at the nuts and bolts that hold it for 'most half a day; then he came down all of a shake, and says the thing can't be done, everything has rusted so, and that if it can't be regilded where it is, it can't be done at all. He won't be hired to go up there again, and I can't find any one hereabouts that will try it for love or money. I even telegraphed to New York for Ferguson, the steeple-climber, offered to pay expenses, and give him seventy-five dollars to boot; but he is engaged two months ahead. I'd give a hundred and fifty dollars to-day," said Mr. Miles, smoking vigorously, "to any one who would shin up there and do the job; for though it isn't an easy thing, I know it can be done."
"Say two hundred, and I'm your man," suddenly exclaimed Ben, who had been listening, carelessly at first, then eagerly. Two hundred dollars would clear the incumbrance from the little brown house. Once he had climbed the pole of the signal-staff on Covert Point, and rove off the halyards almost a hundred and fifty feet from the ground, and was glad to get five dollars for doing it. But then, as Mrs. Buttles said, "Ben was a dretful ventur'some creetur."
Mr. Miles was a man of few words. He eagerly grasped at this unexpected straw.
"If you mean business," he said, eying Ben's self-reliant face approvingly, "come to the church to-morrow morning early, and I will show you what is to be done."
Ben nodded, and made his way back to the Calypso.