human
Do steeple-climbers always work in pairs?
gpt
Usually. It would be hard for one man to do a steeple alone. There are lots of places where you must have some one to fasten a rope or hold the end of a plank or pass you something. Besides, it wouldn't be good for a man's mind to be spending days and days upon steeples all alone. It's bad enough with a partner to talk to. That makes me think of poor old Dan O'Brien. If I hadn't been up with him one day--
human
I'll give you a case where a man alone could never have done the thing, I don't care how clever a steeple-climber he might be. It was on St. Paul's, New York, after we had finished the job and taken everything down. Then somebody noticed that the weather-vane on top of the ball wasn't turning properly. I knew in a minute what the matter was; it was easy enough to fix it, but the thing was to reach the weather-vane. I don't mean that the climb up the steeple was anything; we had done that before; but if I tried to climb around that big ball again (it was the same sort of a wriggling business as that over the bulging stones at Trinity) I would be sure to scrape off a lot of the fine gilding we had just put on. And yet I couldn't get at the weather-vane without getting over the ball. I studied quite a while on this little problem, and solved it with my partner's help. We both climbed the steeple as far as the ball; we went up the lightning-rod; then we roped ourselves on the steeple-shaft by life-lines, and then my partner, that was Joe Lawlor, stood on my shoulders and did the job. You see it was easy enough that way.
gpt
Easy enough!