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Before taking up the matter of knots and splices in detail it may be well to give attention to cordage in general. Cordage, in its broadest sense, includes all forms and kinds of rope, string, twine, cable, etc., formed of braided or twisted strands.
Telephone and telegraph cables are made of any required gauge of wire and with from 1 to 150 conductors in a cable. In jointing these the splices are never soldered, the conductors being joined either with a twist joint or with the so-called Western Union splice.
Only now and again he caught a faint lurch which told his practiced senses that some of the rudely improvised splices were working loose. Even these gave him no great alarm; at least, they did not seem sufficiently serious to warrant an immediate landing.
He obeys orders, heedless of consequences; he issues commands amid the uproar and tumult of pressing emergencies. There is no chance for quackery in his work. The wind and the wave are infallible tests of all his knots and splices. He cannot cheat them. The gale and the lee-shore are not pictures, but fierce realities, with which he has to grapple for life or death.
"There is current, but it's too weak." Jack's voice quavered with his disappointment. "I suppose the rusty splices of that old fence offer too much resistance. "But I'm not beaten yet," he exclaimed, suddenly recovering his determination. Turning from the box, he began pacing up and down the floor. "I'll figure it out somehow if I oh!"
Passing on toward the open plain, I noticed three well-defined terminal moraines curved gracefully across the cañon stream, and joined by long splices to the two noble laterals. These mark the halting-places of the vanished glacier when it was retreating into its summit shadows on the breaking-up of the glacial winter.
I took care as I did so to notch both the splices, so that I might be able to put them together again in the exact place where they had been while making the measurement. All this attention to such minute particulars was of importance, and I knew it to be so, for the mistake of even a quarter of an inch in the length of my diameter would cause a difference of many gallons in the result.
Although they amused themselves with my awkwardness, and annoyed me with practical jokes, they took a pride and pleasure in inducting me into the mysteries of their craft. They taught me the difference between a granny knot and a square knot; how to whip a rope's end; form splices; braid sinnett; make a running bowline, and do a variety of things peculiar to the web-footed gentry.
Add to all this labor the neat work upon the rigging, the knots, flemish-eyes, splices, seizings, coverings, pointings, and graffings which show a ship in crack order. The last preparation, and which looked still more like coming into port, was getting the anchors over the bows, bending the cables, rowsing the hawsers up from between decks, and overhauling the deep-sea lead-line.
Hanmer had accepted the boy's invitation to pay him a visit ashore and help him to rig a model cutter a birthday gift from his father; and the pair had spent an afternoon upon it, seated upon the floor with the toy between them and a litter of twine everywhere, Dicky deep in the mysteries of knots and splices, the lieutenant whittling out miniature blocks and belaying-pins with a knife that seemed capable of anything.
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