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The head is most wonderfully built up, like an arch, of several bones beautifully joined in a very strong and perfect way which carpenters call "dove-tailing."
And over the corners of the angles of the eight sides the fabric must be bound together through its thickness by dove-tailing the stones, and its sides, likewise, must be girt round with oaken ties.
Our artist did as Pontianus suggested, as far as the size of the ebony tablets permitted. By careful dove-tailing of minute portions of the tablets he succeeded in making a small figure of Mercury. You heard all the evidence just as I repeat it.
The leading man was, of course, playing for time until Steve, under the guise of Cabenza, could arrange to win the freedom of the prisoners. This would take time, for success would depend upon several dove-tailing factors. To attempt a rescue and to fail would be practically to sign the death-warrant of Farrar and Threewit.
So much thought; so much band-o-bast; so much dove-tailing and welding together of naval and military methods, signals, technical words, etc., and the worst punishment should any link in the composite chain give way. And then taking success for granted on the top of all this comes the Turk; "unspeakable" he used to be, "unknowable" now. But we shall give him a startler too.
Nor did he rest until he had drawn every sort of building round, square, and octagonal temples, basilicas, aqueducts, baths, arches, colossea, amphitheatres, and every temple built of bricks, from which he copied the methods of binding and of clamping with ties, and also of encircling vaults with them; and he noted the ways of making buildings secure by binding the stones together, by iron bars, and by dove-tailing; and, discovering a hole hollowed out under the middle of each great stone, he found that this was meant to hold the iron instrument, which is called by us the ulivella, wherewith the stones are drawn up; and this he reintroduced and brought into use afterwards.
Will you undertake to swear that Pickwick, the defendant, did not say on the occasion in question "My dear Mrs. Bardell, you're a good creature; compose yourself to this situation, for to this situation you must come," or words to that effect? 'I I didn't understand him so, certainly, said Mr. Winkle, astounded on this ingenious dove-tailing of the few words he had heard.
And in addition, when men considered what he had done in the way of dove-tailing, joining, fixing, and binding together the stones, it made them marvel and tremble to think that one single mind should have been capable of all that the mind of Filippo had proved itself able to execute.
Everything he did would help his arithmetic, and geography, and history; and these and those and all things besides, would help him to understand poetry. In his Latin sentences he found the parts fit into each other like dove-tailing; finding the terms of equations, he said, was like inventing machines, and he soon grew clever at solving them.
When I sit down to write a novel I do not at all know, and I do not very much care, how it is to end. Wilkie Collins seems so to construct his that he not only, before writing, plans everything on, down to the minutest detail, from the beginning to the end; but then plots it all back again, to see that there is no piece of necessary dove-tailing which does not dove-tail with absolute accuracy.
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