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But when we see a lot of framed timbers, different portions of which we know have been gotten out at different times and places and by different workmen Stephen, Franklin, Roger, and James, for instance and when we see these timbers joined together, and see they exactly make the frame of a house or a mill, all the tenons and mortises exactly fitting, and all the lengths and proportions of the different pieces exactly adapted to their respective places, and not a piece too many or too few not omitting even scaffolding or, if a single piece be lacking, we see the place in the frame exactly fitted and prepared yet to bring such piece in in such a case we find it impossible not to believe that Stephen and Franklin and Roger and James all understood one another from the beginning, and all worked upon a common plan or draft drawn up before the first blow was struck.
But when we see a lot of framed timbers, different portions of which we know have been gotten cut at different times and places and by different workmen, Stephen, Franklin, Roger, and James, for instance, and we see these timbers joined together, and see they exactly make the frame of a house or a mill, all the tenons and mortises exactly fitting, and all the lengths and proportions of the different pieces exactly adapted to their respective places, and not a piece too many or too few, not omitting even scaffolding, or, if a single piece be lacking, we see the place in the frame exactly fitted and prepared yet to bring such piece in, in such a case we find it impossible not to believe that Stephen and Franklin and Roger and James all understood one another from the beginning, and all worked upon a common plan or draft drawn up before the first blow was struck.
One of them, unfinished, gave us some idea of its construction: floor sills on posts to ground; roof frame of planks, 1 × 6 inches, bent over to form the sides of the house when completed, all hard wood, without a single nail, the whole being held together by mortises and tenons and other joints, accurately made and neatly fitted.
One could there distinguish, very well, though cleverly united with the principal building by long galleries, decked with painted glass and slender columns, the three Hotels which Charles V. had amalgamated with his palace: the Hotel du Petit-Muce, with the airy balustrade, which formed a graceful border to its roof; the Hotel of the Abbe de Saint-Maur, having the vanity of a stronghold, a great tower, machicolations, loopholes, iron gratings, and over the large Saxon door, the armorial bearings of the abbe, between the two mortises of the drawbridge; the Hotel of the Comte d' Etampes, whose donjon keep, ruined at its summit, was rounded and notched like a cock's comb; here and there, three or four ancient oaks, forming a tuft together like enormous cauliflowers; gambols of swans, in the clear water of the fishponds, all in folds of light and shade; many courtyards of which one beheld picturesque bits; the Hotel of the Lions, with its low, pointed arches on short, Saxon pillars, its iron gratings and its perpetual roar; shooting up above the whole, the scale-ornamented spire of the Ave-Maria; on the left, the house of the Provost of Paris, flanked by four small towers, delicately grooved, in the middle; at the extremity, the Hotel Saint-Pol, properly speaking, with its multiplied facades, its successive enrichments from the time of Charles V., the hybrid excrescences, with which the fancy of the architects had loaded it during the last two centuries, with all the apses of its chapels, all the gables of its galleries, a thousand weathercocks for the four winds, and its two lofty contiguous towers, whose conical roof, surrounded by battlements at its base, looked like those pointed caps which have their edges turned up.
Here he dovetailed and pinned the framework so firmly and cleverly that nothing but human patience and ingenuity could ever get it apart; there he cut under the ends of splendid strong floor joists and dropped them into shallow mortises, so that but an inch or two of the wood really took the strain, and the joist seemed likely to split and drop out, of its own weight.
This denomination of fence is to be seen sometimes in the vicinity of the larger towns, and is constructed of posts six feet in length, sunk in the ground to the depth of about a foot, and at eight or ten feet distance; the rails are then laid into mortises cut into the posts, at intervals of about thirteen or fourteen inches, which completes the work.
But, granted for the moment that we could devise and successfully apply exact and accurate standards of measurement for human beings, our work would be only partially done. Any mechanic knows that it is a sad waste of time and pains to standardize tenons, with micrometer and emery paper, to a thousandth of an inch, so long as the mortises are left unstandardized.
The mortises are to be one inch wide and deep, and one inch apart, to revive slats made of ash, oak, or spruce, one inch square, placed lengthwise of the couch. The slats being small, and so near together, and running lengthwise, make a better spring frame than wire coils. If they warp, they can be turned. They must not be fastened at the ends, except by insertion in the notches.
Of stone they were, like the chair itself, and well mortised: but his great grip wrenched them out of their mortises and they crashed on the dais. "What! You left her a prisoner of the Genoese!" He gazed around them in a wrath that slowly grew cold, freezing into contempt. "Go, sirs; since she commands it, room shall be found for you all. My house for the while is yours. But go from me now."
That was not difficult, because the glue in the mortises had long since perished. Soon the bottom was lying on the table beside the screws, and the interior of the case revealed. The pair of weapons which Colwyn lifted from the case were horse pistols of a period when countryfolk feared to ride abroad without some such protection against highwaymen. They were superior specimens of their type.
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