Page:St. Nicholas, vol. 40.1 (1912-1913).djvu/602



I come! I did n‘t stop to read the letter twice, but tore out of the village post-office and started for home at a pace that would have set a new world’s record, had there been any official there to time me. I burst into the front door, and bounded up-stairs to Mother’s room, three steps at a time, making the old house tremble under my lumbering leaps.

Oddly enough, Mother knew all about it. Uncle Edward had already written to Father and Mother, and had persuaded them to let me go. Their consent was obtained before I could ask it, and all I had to do was to write to Will a formal acceptance, and arrange for a meeting-place.

But how had Uncle Edward happened to put up a thousand dollars for this treat? Neither Will nor I knew until the summer was over, although I am sure that we would not have used the time differently had we known at the outset.

It seems that Uncle Edward had been boasting of Will’s fine marks at school, and declared his intention of sending my chum to college next fall. Dr. McGreggor, Uncle Edward's associate, was inclined to doubt Will’s fitness for engineering, and quite a discussion ensued. Finally, Uncle Edward decided to settle the argument by a test. Goethe, the great German philosopher, once said: “One sees at Rome what one takes there.” Uncle Edward was going to put Will in New York, let him spend the summer as he pleased, asking only that he keep a diary of what he saw and did. Then, by looking over the diary, Uncle Edward could tell what Will took to the city with him. In other words, if the diary was full of the engineering sights and wonders of the city, it would show conclusively that Will had brought with him a love for engineering. If no engineering tendencies appeared, Uncle Edward declared that he would not treat Will to a course in college. To be sure, I was in no way related to Uncle Edward, but as I had often met him, having been Will’s room-mate and particular school chum for several years, it was my good luck that I should be invited too.

When I received Will’s letter, I was so excited that I could n’t sleep that night; and if my readers are half as eager to plunge into our real experiences as I was, we can well afford to skip the tedious details of preparation that occupied nearly a week, and start our story with a bright Monday morning in June, when Will and I emerged from our boarding-house and sought out a sight-seeing bus. We thought that in that way we could get a general survey of the city, and then we could pick out the more interesting sights for especial investigation.

The ride on that bus was a very novel experience to me and to Will too; for, although he had seen the city on several occasions, his visits had always been very brief, and, really, he scarcely knew any more about the town than I.

were all eyes, and we drank in every word that the megaphone man called out. When we got down to the tall buildings, we were gaping like country gawks, particularly as we came alongside the new Manhattan, whose skeleton of steel already reached 500 feet in the air; and the funny thing about it was that the walls were not built from the ground up, but started from about the fifth floor. Below that there was nothing but open steelwork. Even when we were blocks away, we had to crane our necks to see the top of the building. As we came nearer, we could hear the tr-r-r-r of the pneumatic riveting hammers that sounded like locusts on a hot day.

“And those iron-workers,” recited the mega-phone man, “have no more fear of falling than a sparrow. They will run along a beam only six inches wide like squirrels on a telephone cable, and leap from one perch to another when a single misstep, the slightest misjudgment, a falter of the eye, would mean a fearful plunge of fifteen seconds with a velocity ten times as great as that of an express-train.”

Up on the very top of a post that projected twenty-five feet above the rest of the structure. I could see a man standing and waiting for a beam that was slowly swung toward him by a derrick. A sickening feeling seized me, my knees grew weak, and I shrank into a huddle of fright as he reached far out for the beam. My nerves were Copyright, 1913, by A. Russell Bond.