"No," they replied; "he has made it a rule not to give anything to any charity that is situated within twenty miles of Skibo."
At the time I thought this was hard, not to say foolish. On further reflection, however, I can see he is wise; he does not want his demesne to become a magnet, drawing hospitals, almshouses, and what not to its immediate vicinity from the uttermost ends of the earth.
When I am given a job, I usually keep quiet about it beforehand. It is no use attracting a crowd, and that is precisely what happens if the news gets spread abroad. The work of a steeplejack seems to exercise a quite extraordinary fascination over all sorts and conditions of men.
Thus, at Aldershot recently, some twenty thousand people assembled to see me throw two chimneys. They flocked to the scene from the surrounding neighbourhood, and Aldershot itself made high holiday of the occasion, most of the big works being closed.
The authorities kept the ground clear, although I must say that the crowd showed no disposition to invade the immediate proximity of the stacks, when once we had got fairly to work on them. Even the dwelling-houses within a possible radius of the falling masses were deserted, and one family erected a tent in a neighbouring field and camped out in it until all danger was at an end.
They need not have been scared, however, for the stacks fell exactly upon the lines I had chalked out for them. Outsiders can rarely be made to understand how comparatively simple it is for a steeplejack who knows his business to make a chimney fall precisely where he wills it to.
In many instances exactitude in this matter is the first essential. In the case of the great Par stack, in Cornwall, for example, I was under forfeit of two hundred pounds not to deviate more than a yard either way from the space marked out for it, which was only a foot or two wider than its own diameter.
This insistence was quite reasonable, for the chimney was surrounded with cottages, and stood close alongside the main line of railway. Officials and populace were alike alarmed, and the former begged of me to desist. When I declined, they held up the traffic as a measure of precaution until I had completed the job. As a matter of fact, not even a window in the cottages was broken nor a shilling's-worth of damage done to the railway line.
People are always asking me to take them with me to the tops of shafts and steeples. Usually I decline, but I have to make exceptions. I have piloted some scores of clergymen to the summits of the steeples of their own churches; and once I escorted the reverend incumbent's daughter, a sprightly girl of eighteen. I was rather nervous about it, but I need not have been. She was the steadiest and coolest climber, for an amateur, that I ever had any dealings with.
I cannot end this article without speaking about what I always call "my most romantic climb." This was at Athenry, in County Galway. A steeple had been struck by lightning and knocked out of the perpendicular. After this it had been taken down—an easy job—but nobody could be found who could put it up again. When several other steeplejacks had failed I was sent for as a forlorn hope, and succeeded. The romance of the climb, however, lies not in this feat, but in the fact that it was from the spire, after its replacement, that I first caught sight of the young lady who is now my wife.