d
ornaments, and ending in massive beams and braces where the steeple's
greater width gives full security.

"What sort of work did you do on these steeples?" I asked.

"All kinds; stone-mason's work, painter's work, blacksmith's work,
carpenter's work--why, a good steeple-climber has to know something
about 'most every trade. It's painting flagpoles, and scraping off shale
from a steeple's sides, and repairing loose stones and ornaments, and
putting up lightning-rods, and gilding crosses, and cleaning
smoke-stacks so high that it makes you dizzy to look up, let alone
looking down, and a dozen other things. Sometimes we have to take a
whole steeple down, beginning at the top, stone by stone--unless it's a
wooden steeple, and then we burn her down five or six feet at a time,
with creosote painted around where you want the fire to stop; the
creosote puts it out. Once I blew off the whole top of a steeple with
dynamite; and, by the way, I'll tell you about that some time."

Conversing with a steeple-climber (when he feels like telling things) is
like breathing oxygen; you find it over-stimulating. In ten minutes'
matter-of-fact talking he opens so many vistas of thrilling interest
that you stand before them bewildered. He starts to answer one question,
and you burn to interrupt him with ten others, each of which will lead
you hopelessly away from the remaining nine.

"Did you ever have any experiences with lightning?" I asked Merrill, one
day.

"Oh, a few," he said. "A thunderbolt struck the Trinity steeple the very
day we finished our work. We had just taken down our tackle and staging
after gilding the cross when--by the way, they say there's a hundred
dollars in gold under that cross."

"Really?" I exclaimed. "How did it get there?"

"Somebody ordered it put there when the steeple was built. People often
do queer things like that. I painted a flagpole on a barn up in
Massachusetts where there was four hundred dollars in gold hidden under
the weather-vane. Everybody knew it was there, because the farmer who
put it there told everybody, and my partner was crazy to saw off the end
of that pole some night and fool 'em, but of course I wouldn't have it."

Here was I quite off my thunderbolt trail, and although curious about
that farmer, I came back to it resolutely.

"Well," resumed Merrill, "this lightning stroke came down the new rod
all right until it reached the bell-deck, and there it circled round and
round t