a jerk. It's a little thing, yet the
climber's heart would not pound harder were the whole steeple falling.
Merrill told me that one of his greatest frights came from the simple
brushing against his legs of a rope pulled without a word by a careless
partner. To Merrill's nerves, all a-quiver, this was not a rope, but
some nameless catastrophe to overwhelm him. He knew only that something
had moved where nothing had any business to move, that something had
touched him where nothing was. A steeple-climber is like a child in the
dark--in terror of the unknown. In all the world, perhaps, there is no
one so utterly alone as he, swinging hour after hour on his steeple-top.
The aeronaut has with him a living, surging creature--his balloon; the
diver feels always the teeming life of the waters; but this man, lifted
into still air, poised on a point where nothing comes or goes, where
nothing moves, where nothing makes a sound--he, in very truth, is alone.

[Illustration: LOOKING FROM THE GROUND UPWARD AT ST. PAUL'S SPIRE,
BROADWAY, NEW YORK CITY.]

"It's always the little things that frighten you," reflected Merrill,
"not the big things. I'll give you an instance. When I went up inside
St. Paul's steeple the first time (I wanted to inspect the beams, and
see how the dowel was anchored) I got into a tight place that might well
frighten a man. I got squeezed fast between timbers that fill nearly all
the slender top space, and couldn't get up or down, but just hung there,
breathing air full of dust and calling for help. I called three quarters
of an hour before any one came, and then it was only by accident. But I
wasn't frightened. On the other hand, a day or two later, when I was
making fast a rope outside (I was just under the ball that holds the
weather-vane) I got a bad start from nothing at all. I had my arms
around the spindle of the steeple, making a hitch, and my head pressed
against the copper sheathing, when I heard a most unearthly screech. I
guess the shock of that thing did me five hundred dollars' worth of
harm--shortened my life days enough to earn five hundred dollars in. And
what do you think it was? The weather-vane had turned a little in the
wind and creaked on its bearings, that's all. It doesn't seem as if that
ought to scare a man, does it?"

There was something quite touching, I thought, in the humble frankness
of this big-shouldered man. Yes, he had been afraid, he whose business
it was to fear nothing, a