Forests of Maine

CHAPTER VI. EBONY AND PINE.

After riding along a short distance in silence, Marco introduced the subject of the different woods once more. He asked Forester which was the most costly of all the woods.

"Costly is not an ambiguous term," said Forester; "that means, which has the greatest money value."

"Yes," said Marco. "I suppose it is mahogany."

"O no," said Forester.

"Rose wood, then," said Marco. "It must be rose wood. My mother has a beautiful piano made of rose wood."

"No," said Forester. "Ebony is more costly than either rose wood or mahogany. They sell ebony by the pound."

"Where does ebony come from?" asked Marco.

"I don't know," replied Forester.

"I should like to know," said Marco. "How much do they sell it for, by the pound?"

"I don't know that, either," said Forester. "I know very little about it, only that it is a very costly wood, on account of some peculiar properties which it has, and its scarcity."

"What are the peculiar properties?" asked Marco.

"One is, its great hardness," said Forester. "It is very hard indeed. Another is, its color."

"What color is it?" asked Marco.

"Black," replied Forester,-"black as jet; at least, one kind is black as jet. There is a kind which is brown. It is called brown ebony."

"I don't think black is very pretty," said Marco.

"No," said Forester; "there does not seem to be much beauty in black, in itself considered; but then, for certain purposes, it is much handsomer than any other color would be; for a cane, for instance."

Marco looked at the beech cane which he had before him, and began to consider how it would look if it were black.

"I suppose I could paint my cane black," said he, after a moment's pause, "if you think it would be any better."

"No," said Forester; "I should prefer having it of its natural color. The bark of the beech has beautiful colors, if they are only brought out by a coat of varnish."

"Brought out?" repeated Marco.

"Yes," said Forester. "There is a kind of fine dust, or something like that, which dims the bark; but, when you put on oil or varnish, there is a sort of transparency given to the outside coating, which brings the natural color of the bark fully to view."

"Then I will get my cane varnished, when I get to Bath," said Marco.

"Ebony," said Forester, "is used a great deal where a contrast with ivory is wanted. Ebony is hard and fine-grained, like ivory, and it takes a high polish. So, whenever they want a contrast of black and white, they take ebony and ivory."

"When do they want a contrast between black and white?"

"One case," replied Forester, "is that of the keys of a piano forte. They want the short keys, which mark the semi-tones, of a different color from the others, so that the eye will catch them as quick as possible. So in a chess-board. They sometimes make chess-boards with alternate squares of ebony and ivory."

"I think it would be just as well to take common wood and paint it black," said Marco, "rather than pay so much money for ebony."

"No," said Forester, "that would not do so well. The paint would wear off; or, if it did not wear off by handling, still, if it got a little knock or hard rub, a part would come off, and that would show a little spot which would be of the natural color of the wood. This would look very badly."

"Then, besides, painted wood," continued Forester, "cannot be finished off so smoothly, and polished up so highly, as a wood which is black by nature. They have a way of staining wood, however, which is better than painting it."

"How is that done?" asked Marco.

"Why, they make a black stain," said Forester, "which they put upon the wood. This staining soaks in a little way, and blackens the fibres of the wood itself, beneath the surface. This, of course, will not wear off as easily as paint."

"I should not think it would wear off at all," said Marco.

"Yes," replied Forester, "for, if a cane is made of any wood stained black, after a time the wood itself wears away farther than the staining had penetrated. Then the fresh wood will come to view. So that, if you want anything black, it is much better to make it of a wood which is black all the way through.

"Besides," continued Forester, "ebony is a very hard wood, and it will bear knocks and rough usages much better than other kinds of wood which are softer. Once I made a carpenter an ebony wedge, to split his laths with."

"What are laths?" asked Marco.

"Laths are the thin split boards which are nailed upon the sides of a room before the plastering is put on. Sometimes laths are made very narrow, and are nailed on at a little distance from each other, so as to leave a crack between them. Then the plastering, being soft when it is put on, works into the cracks, and thus clings to the wood when it is dry and hard. If plastering was put on to smooth boards, or a smooth wall, it would all fall off again very easily."

"Yes," said Marco; "I have seen the plastering coming up through the cracks in the garret at your house in Vermont."

"The lath boards," continued Forester, "are sometimes made narrow, and nailed on at a little distance from each other, and sometimes they are wide boards, split up, but not taken apart, and then the cracks, which are made in splitting them, are forced open when the boards are nailed on. The way they do it, is this. They put the wide lath board down upon a plank, and make a great many cracks in it with an axe. Then they put it upon the wall, or ceiling, and nail one edge. Then they take a wedge and drive into one of the cracks, and force it open far enough to let the plastering in. Then they put in some more nails, in such a manner as to keep that crack open. Then they wedge open another crack, and nail again; and so on, until they have nailed on the whole board, so as to leave the cracks all open."

"And you made the carpenter an ebony wedge?" said Marco.

"Yes," said Forester. "He had had wedges made of the hardest wood that he could get, but they would soon become bruised, and battered, and worn out, with their hard rubbing against the sides of the cracks. At last, I told him I had a very hard kind of wood, and I gave him a piece of ebony. He made it into a wedge, and, after that, he had no more difficulty. He said his ebony wedge was just like iron."

"Was it really as hard as iron?" asked Marco.

"Oh, no," said Forester,-"but it was much harder than any wood which he could get. He thought it was a very curious wood. He had never seen any like it before."

"I should like some ebony," said Marco.

"Ebony would be an excellent wood to make a top of," said Forester, "it is so hard and heavy."

"I should like to have a top hard," said Marco, "but I don't think it would be any better for being heavy."

"Yes," said Forester; "the top would spin longer. The heavier a top is, the longer it will spin."

"Then I should like a top made of lead," said Marco.

"It would spin very long," said Forester, "if it was well made, though it would require more strength to set it a-going well. But lead would be soft, and thus would easily get bruised and indented. Besides, black would be a prettier color for a top than lead color. A jet black top, well polished, would be very handsome."

"Is black a color?" asked Marco. "I read in a book once that black and white were not colors."

"There are two meanings to the word color," said Forester. "In one sense, black is a color, and in another sense, it is not. For instance, if a lady were to go into a shop, and ask for some morocco shoes for a little child, and they were to show her some black ones, she might say she did not want black ones; she wanted colored ones. In that sense, black would not be a color.

"On the other hand," continued Forester, "she might ask for silk stockings, and if the shopkeeper were to ask her what color she wanted, she might say black. In that sense, black would be a color."

"Which is the right sense?" asked Marco.

"Both are right," said Forester. "When a word is commonly used in two senses, both are correct. The philosophers generally consider black not to be a color; that is, they generally use the word in the first sense."

"Why?" asked Marco.

"For this reason," replied Forester. He was going on to explain the reason, when suddenly Marco's attention was attracted by the sight of a long raft of logs, which was coming down the river. They had been riding at some distance from the river, and out of sight of it, but now it came suddenly into view, just as this raft was passing by. There were two men on the raft.

"See those men on the raft," said Marco. "They are paddling."

"No," replied Forester; "they are sculling."

"Sculling?" repeated Marco.

"Yes," replied Forester. "They always scull a raft. It is a different motion from paddling."

Marco watched the men attentively, examining the motion which they made in sculling, and considering whether he might not have sculled his raft to the shore in the same manner.

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"What straight logs!" said Marco.

"Yes," replied Forester; "the pine tree grows up tall and straight, and without branches, to a great height. This is the source of some of its most valuable properties. It makes the wood straight-grained. That is, the fibres run smooth and regularly, from one end of the stem to the other."

Just at this time, Forester saw a large pine tree growing alone, by the side of the road they were travelling. This solitary tree had a great many branches growing out from the stem, in every part, from the top to the bottom.

"That is because the tree grows by itself," said Forester, "in the open field. Those that grow in the forest do not throw out branches from the stem, but they ran up to a great height, with only a little tuft of branches on the top."

"I don't see why they don't have branches in the woods," said Marco.

"Because," replied Forester, "where trees grow close together, the light and the air is excluded from the lower parts of the stems, and so branches cannot grow there. Nothing can grow without light and air."

"I've seen monstrous long potato sprouts grow in a dark cellar," said Marco.

"Yes," said Forester; "so have I. I did not think of that. But they don't grow very well."

"They grow pretty long, sometimes," replied Marco.

"At any rate," said Forester, "the branches of trees will not grow from the stems of the trees near the ground, in the woods; and this is of great importance, for, whenever a branch grows out, it makes a knot, extending in to the very centre of the tree. This would injure a pine log very much, as the knot would show in all the boards, and a knot is a great injury to a pine board, though it is of great benefit to a mahogany one."

"Why?" asked Marco.

"Because it gives the wood a beautiful variegated appearance when they get it smoothed. So that the more knotted and gnarled a log of mahogany is, the better. It makes the more beautiful wood. But in pine, it is not beauty, but facility of working, which is the great object. So they always want to get pine as smooth and straight-grained as possible. So that one of these trees that grow detached, in the fields, would not be of much value for lumber. It has so many branches, that the boards made from it would be full of knots."

"That is the reason, I suppose," said Marco, "why they don't cut them down, and make them into boards."

"Perhaps it is," replied Forester.

"Has pine any other very good qualities?" asked Marco.

"I believe it is quite a durable wood," said Forester. "At any rate, the stumps last a very long time in the ground. I have heard it said that there are some stumps in the state of Maine with the old mark of G. R. upon them."

"What does G. R. mean?" asked Marco.

"Georgius Rex," replied Forester,-"that is, George, the king. If there are any such, the mark on them means that they belonged to the king of England, before this country was separated from England. In those days, the king's workmen went into the forests to select and mark the trees which were to be cut down for the king's use, and these marks were left upon the stumps."

"And how long ago was that?" asked Marco.

"O, it must have been sixty or seventy years ago. But I can hardly believe that the stumps would last as long as that."

"I mean to ask some of the men, when I get up in the woods, how long the stumps do last," said Marco.

"They last very long, I know," said Forester. "The people, after getting tired of waiting to have them rot out, tear them up with machines, and make fences of them."

"I don't see how they can make fences of stumps," said Marco.

"They put them in a row, with the roots in the air," replied Forester. "They make a funny-looking fence."

Just at this time Marco perceived a large town coming into view before them, which, Forester told him, was Bath. There were several ships building along the shore of the river.

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