NOTED FOR CROOKEDNESS.
A LARGE box of sand stood in the yard. It was intended for use in improving the flowerbeds, but in the meantime the children were improving their opportunity. They had found it damp enough to mold easily into shape, and they had made ovens, houses and sand-gardens with great satisfaction, until Milly suddenly remembered the picture she had seen the evening before. "Oh, let's make that Tower of—of—that pretty tower in Italy that leans 'way over, don't you know?" she said. It was the "Leaning Tower of Pisa" of which she was thinking.
"We can't. If we don't build it straight, it will fall right over," answered Georgie. He was busy digging a well just then, and did not want to try anything else. But Milly was not so easily discouraged.
"Why, the real one don't," she urged.
"Well, that's because—because— Anyway, people can't build any more like it," said Georgie, accounting for the wonder as clearly as have many older persons, and atoning for his uncertainty on that point by his positiveness on the latter one.
"I'm going to build one anyway," insisted Milly,
"and I'm going to make it real high."
"You can't have much sand to do it with, then, because I want all this half for a great wall 'round my well," declared Georgie, marking off a very large portion with his hand.
"It isn't your sand."
"I began to build my well first, and you haven't any right to take sand enough to spoil it."
That was the beginning. In a minute or two the voices were so quick and loud that one might have thought it was the Tower of Babel they were talking of building instead of the Tower of Pisa.
The sound drew grandpa from his book and easy-chair under the great apple-tree, with the words,—
"What is the matter? Two children actually quarreling over a box of sand!"
The small faces under the hat and the sunbonnet flushed, but Georgie explained, rather indignantly.
"Of course we couldn't do what Milly wanted," he concluded.
"I guess you might have tried," said Milly, with her little sandy hands thrust into her apron-pockets.
"What's the use of trying, when you can't do it? Nobody can build anything like that leaning tower now; can they, grandpa?"
"I'm afraid," said grandpa, shaking his head,
"that there is a great deal of that kind of building.
There must have been some defect in the foundation of that great tower at Pisa, and though it was probably unthought of or unknown at first, it is the one thing about it now that shows most plainly to all the world. Costly material, beautiful pillars, fine designs went into that building, but it is not for those that it is noted. Everybody knows it by that fault in the foundation; it is the Leaning Tower of Pisa. And there are people in the world whose characters are built in very much the same way, Georgie. They may have many good qualities, but some fault in the foundation has warped and twisted the whole until they are more widely known by their crookedness than by anything else
—their meanness or selfishness or ill-temper, or something of that sort. Be careful while you are building in the sand, that you are not building crookedly somewhere else, children." Georgie slowly filled up his well as grandpa turned away, and Milly, after watching him a moment, patted the beginning of her tower flat again.
"Georgie," she said, "let's put it all together again, and build a great big orphan 'sylum to make good children of folks."
—Kate W. Hamilton, in S. S. Visitor.
HOW SPOOLS ARE MADE.
AT Drummondville, on the St. Francis River, Canada, on the line of the northern division of the
Southeastern Railway, there are large factories for making spools from white birch, which grows in profusion there.
The farmers get from two dollars and fifty cents to three dollars per cord for the wood, which, after being delivered to the factories, is first sawn into pieces about four feet long and
from an inch to an inch and a half square, according to the size of the spool it is desired to make.
These pieces are put into a stove and thoroughly dried, whence they are taken into the factory and given to the "roughers," who in a short space of time bore a hole in the center a couple of inches deep, turn about the same space round, and then cut off the length required for the spool.
The machines used for this purpose are revolving planers, in the center of which is a revolving gimlet or bit, and immediately to the right a small circular saw with a gauge set to the proper size for the spools.
One proprietor ships over two million spools per month to England, and another firm ships over one million to Scotland.