It was now the latter part of winter; the snow was deep; Charlie began to think about cutting his mast, main boom, and bowsprit. He did not at first contemplate having anything above the top-gallant sail; but when Sally came home and related her conversation with Mrs. Yelf, Ben said, “Charlie you must gratify the old lady; it would be bad luck and a sin not to do so.”

“But, father, there is no sail that she could weave cloth enough for.”

“Well, then you must have one on purpose for her; have a flying royal; there will be no braces, the sheets will make fast to the top-gallant yard, it will furl right in with the top-gallant sail, the yard will be underneath the top-gallant stay and when the yard hoists up, the stay will go with it; it will be a little thing, not more than forty or forty-five yards: she can do that well enough.”

The lower mast was no less than twenty-eight inches in diameter when made, and eighty feet long. This required a tree of great size; there was no such one left in the lot from which the boys were to cut their timber, and they were obliged to buy one. The bowsprit, which was shorter, and the boom, which, though seventy-five feet in length, was much smaller, they could obtain on their own lot. There were trees enough on the island of much larger size; but those enormous trees, that would make a thirty-six inch mast for a man-of-war Ben didn’t like to cut, now that the pressure of poverty was removed.

It would have been a great deal of work for Charlie to have gone on to his own land, broken a road through the deep snow to the back end of his lot to obtain it; then, to tow so large a stick six miles would have been a great undertaking in the winter time.

“Charlie,” said Ben, “there’s a tree stands a couple of rods to the north-east of the big pine that has the eagle’s nest on it, large enough to make your mast. There’s a short crook in it near the top; if it is long enough below that, I will sell it to you cheap, because the crook spoils it for a mast for a ship of the line, though it is large enough otherwise: let us go and look at it.”

When they came to view it, Ricker, who was a man of great experience in the woods, thought it was long enough; Ben thought it was not; Charlie didn’t presume to give an opinion, but his knowledge of surveying helped him out of the difficulty. “I’ll measure it,” he said.

“You can’t climb it,” said Ben, “and there’s no scrubby tree to fall on to it, to climb: how are you going to measure it?”

The ground around was level; Charlie made a mark on the tree where it was to be cut off, then measured a distance from it equal to the length of his mast, and drove down a stake; then cut two straight ash sprouts, one two feet, the other one foot long, found the middle of the longest, made a hole in it with the point of his jackknife, whittled the end of the short one to a wedge, and stuck it into it. He now got down on his hands and knees at the stake, held the short stick as nearly level with the mark on the butt of the tree as possible, then sighted over the ends of the two sticks; his eye struck the tree a short distance below the crook.

“It’s a snug rub, but I guess ’twill go; cut it down. I’ll risk it.”

Ricker and John soon brought the great tree to the ground, when it was found to be seven inches longer than required. These two ash sprouts were Charlie’s theodolite, and answered his purpose as well as one that would cost two hundred dollars.

“Well done, my boy,” said Ben, who had watched the operation with great interest. “That’s a capital application of the principle that the two sides of a right-angled triangle are equal.”

“I could have hit it exactly if I had brought a plumb line, to have taken a true level of the base.”

The reason that Charlie made the perpendicular stick longer than the other was, that he might get his eye down to sight at the trunk of the tree; otherwise he must have dug a hole in the ground.