"There!" he would say, in an injured tone, "now the nail's gone."
And we would all have to go down on our knees and grovel for it, while he
would stand on the chair, and grunt, and want to know if he was to be
kept there all the evening.
The nail would be found at last, but by that time he would have lost the
hammer.
"Where's the hammer? What did I do with the hammer? Great heavens!
Seven of you, gaping round there, and you don't know what I did with the
hammer!"
We would find the hammer for him, and then he would have lost sight of
the mark he had made on the wall, where the nail was to go in, and each
of us had to get up on the chair, beside him, and see if we could find
it; and we would each discover it in a different place, and he would call
us all fools, one after another, and tell us to get down. And he would
take the rule, and re-measure, and find that he wanted half thirty-one
and three-eighths inches from the corner, and would try to do it in his
head, and go mad.
And we would all try to do it in our heads, and all arrive at different
results, and sneer at one another. And in the general row, the original
number would be forgotten, and Uncle Podger would have to measure it
again.
He would use a bit of string this time, and at the critical moment, when
the old fool was leaning over the chair at an angle of forty-five, and
trying to reach a point three inches beyond what was possible for him to
reach, the string would slip, and down he would slide on to the piano, a
really fine musical effect being produced by the suddenness with which
his head and body struck all the notes at the same time.
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