Chapter XLV: Wood-Working and Carving; Or, Walking-Sticks and How to

TREAT THEM.

Walking-sticks of all varieties--apple, ash, blackthorn, brier, cherry, elm, hazel, holly, oak, vine, and whitethorn--are best when cut in the winter, between November and February; the sap is then sluggish, the leaves are off, and the character of the stick can be most easily descried.

To boys who desire to carry a stick of their own choice and dressing, the following practical notes will be of value.

Never attempt to trim a stick as soon as you have cut it. Leave the branches on it an inch or two long, and hang the stick up to dry for a week or so, knob end uppermost with a weight on the narrow end. Let it hang in a moderately cool place, and when it is dry and pliable, take it down and begin to trim it. Cut off the branches you do not want, and make the crook if you do not care to finish merely with a knob. To make the crook, plunge the end for a quarter of an hour in boiling water, bend it to shape, and keep it in place by a piece of string twisted by a stick in the middle, like the spring of a jumping frog, or the stretcher of a ribbon saw. When the stick has dried in shape, trim it to taste with a sharp knife, and give it a good rub down with sand-paper. When it is smooth and presentable, if you want it to remain its natural colour, give it a coat of boiled linseed-oil, and let this dry thoroughly into it. If you want the stick to be black, boil a pound of logwood chips for an hour in a quart of water, and brush the stick over with the boiling liquor. When the stick is dry, give it another boiling coat of the decoction. When that is dry, dissolve an ounce of green copperas in a quart of hot water and coat the stick with the solution. Keep the stick away from the fire, and let it dry each time slowly and well, and you will find that the mixture of the copperas and the logwood has dyed it an intense black. After you have stained it, give it a coat of boiled oil, and when that is thoroughly dry, begin to polish it.

For the polish, mix an ounce and a half of shellac with a quarter of an ounce of gum mastic, and dissolve them slowly in half a pint of methylated spirits, or, what is better, quicker, and cheaper, buy threepenny worth of French polish from the nearest oil-shop.

Having polished the stick, finish it with a coat of hard varnish or copal varnish such as the artists use, of which a little goes a long way. Hard varnish can be bought cheaply. If you must make it, mix together an ounce of gum mastic, two ounces of gum juniper, a quarter of an ounce of turpentine, and a pint of methylated spirits. Give the stick one or two even coats of varnish, and you will find it last for many months. Some sticks do very well varnished over the oil and stain, then the polish is saved. If you want to stain a stick brown, add dragon’s blood to the polish; if you like it golden coloured, drop in some yellow ochre or gamboge. The difficulty in stick-making, however, is not in the polishing; it is in the bending and trimming.

Apple makes excellent sticks if judiciously dried. Ash sticks are best cut from saplings; when cut from hedges or pollards, they are inclined to become brittle. Like apple sticks, they require careful seasoning to be serviceable. Blackthorn sticks are heavy, and liable to splinter. They are best when cut from saplings. Brier sticks are also best when cut from saplings. Cherry sticks should be stripped of only a part of their bark, and require sand-papering, oiling, polishing, and varnishing. Elm sticks should have the rough bark left on; they also are best when taken from saplings, but it is very seldom indeed that an elm stick is fit for anything else than to be looked at. Hazel sticks are light and handsome, and do good service, no matter whence they are cut. They should be well rubbed down with sandpaper and carefully varnished. Holly sticks are as good as any. Cut them from the branch with the crook or knob attached, and let them have a long time to dry. Oak sticks are the strongest and toughest, but the most difficult to dry and trim. If you dry them too rapidly they split, if you dry them with the bark off they split, if you have the knots close together they split. If you get a good oak cudgel you can smash any stick of any other wood not exceeding it in size. Vine sticks are also of value, but they have an unpleasant tendency to warp and twist. Whitethorn sticks are like unto blackthorn sticks--heavy, treacherous, and brittle.

If you want to bark a stick, steep it in hot water, and rub off the coat with a piece of sacking. If you want to bend or straighten a stick, cover it with hot wet sand, and get it into shape while it is hot.

Of canes we need make no mention, nor need we deal with the birch. They are but luxuries, frequently doomed to be misunderstood. Their days are over. Alas, poor cane! Alas, poor birch!

Nothing has been said so far about carving its handle, and as a stick of our own cutting and carving has a certain charm about it, and in its making affords an agreeable exercise for a wet day, we herewith give a couple of designs which can easily be improved upon, and which are grotesque enough to look well even as failures; and this to a beginner is a quality not to be despised. We may as well, however, adopt the usual plan of descending from generals to particulars, and find space for a few notes on stick history.

When Œdipus solved the riddle of the Sphinx, he thought of a walking-stick--as many others of the puzzled have done. ‘There’s a being,’ said the riddler, ‘which has four feet, and three feet, with only one voice; but its feet vary, and when it has the most it is the weakest.’ ‘That,’ said Œdipus, ‘must be man, who, when he is a child, crawls on his hands and knees; when he is a man walks uprightly; and when he is old totters with a walking-stick!’

On the origin and development of the walking-stick a goodly volume might be written. Perhaps the most interesting form the stick took was that of the pilgrim’s staff. This staff was about four feet long, armed at the lower end with a spike, and fitted about a foot from its top with a knob for the hand to rest upon. The lower part was solid, the upper part was hollow, and was used for relics of saints, or a musical instrument, or something to eat, according to the taste of the owner. It was in a pilgrim’s staff that saffron was secretly brought from Greece to Saffron Walden, and it was in a similar way that silkworms found their way to Europe. This idea of using a stick as a carrier has been utilised in our own days, not only for telescopes, match-boxes, swords, and guns, but also for surgeons’ instruments.

Another striking form was that of the ferula, which derives its name from the giant fennel, of whose stalk it generally consisted. The tough lightness of the fennel wood rendered it particularly suited for the support of the aged, and hence it gradually became the prototype of those lighter wands which have continued amongst us as a sign of office or seniority; and at the same time it retained its popularity with the chastisers of erratic youth. In the East the ferula was replaced by the reed; but in Egypt the reed gave place to slender sticks of cherry wood, some of which had a carved handle. This carving of the head is, however, peculiar to no country and no age. It is a practice indulged in by all men, savage and civilised.

In our own Tudor period the walking-stick began to flourish much. Then for the first time do we get it elaborately carved and adorned with precious metals. In the inventory of the old palace at Greenwich, there is entered, “A cane garnished with sylver and gilte, with astronomie upon it. A cane garnished with golde, having a perfume on the toppe; under that a diall with a pair of twitchers and a pair of compasses of golde; and a foot rule of golde, a knife and a file of golde, with a whetstone tipped with golde.” A somewhat elaborate battery to carry in a walking stick! In the seventeenth century sticks became even more ornamental, and in the eighteenth they began to be made entirely of agate, or clouded marble, or ivory. How these were used and abused can be learnt from No. 103 of the _Tattler_, where Isaac Bickerstaffe issues licences regarding them, and is appealed to by petitioners, one of whom asks for permission to retain his cane on account of its having become as indispensable to him as any of his other limbs. “The knocking of it upon his shoe, leaning one leg upon it, or whistling upon it with his mouth, are such great reliefs to him in conversation, that he does not know how he should be good company without it.” Later on this fashion of elaborate walking sticks was adopted by the old ladies, and it was quite common to see the dames out walking with wood, ivory, whalebone, or green glass sticks, five or six feet in length, having the ends bent over like a shepherd’s crook, and twisted back again towards the ground.

In these days, now that the means of communication have been so much improved and the world become one huge country, foreign sticks have lost much of their rarity. They come to us in tons, and a stick importer’s warehouse is a sight to see. The goods in the rough do not look inviting; in fact, anything more resembling a lot of firewood it would be difficult to imagine. Those who have not the chance of seeing the interior of one of these stores, can obtain a very good notion of what they are like by inspecting a shop window next door to the Autotype Gallery in what used to be New Oxford Street. There can be seen canes of all sorts, rough and rooty, from the eastern and western tropics--rajahs from Borneo; malaccas from Sumatra (nearly all the malaccas come from Siak, they are the stems of _Calamus scipionum_); whanghees (the stems of _Phyllostachis_) from Hongkong; lawyers (a species of _Calamus_) from Penang; ratans and dragons from Calcutta; white bamboos, black bamboos, fluted bamboos from other seaports in the great Bay of Bengal; partridge canes, jambees, and dog’s-head canes; Spanish reeds (_Arundo donax_); jacks (vine stems), cinnamons, pimentos (the stem of the allspice), cabbage-stalks, and coffee-branches from the West Indies, with the green-backed orange and knobby lemon sticks from the same colonies; triangular leaf stalks of the date palm from Tunis; myrtle, pomegranate, and olive sticks from Algeria and Italy; blue gums from Australia; mahoganies from Cuba; ebonies, tulips, and crocodiles; cabbage-stalks from Guernsey; and, perhaps, tooroos from Guiana.

But English sticks, and the foreign importations supposed to be such, are the favourites after all, and it is them that we would ask our readers to choose for their experiments. The chief, as already explained, are oak, ash, beech, blackthorn, cherry, maple, crab, and hazel, all of them within reach of those that walk or dwell in country places, and all easily dressed and made presentable.

The most useful of them are the ash and beech, which can be stained and cut to resemble any stick, and form the raw material of almost all the shams. A goodly proportion of the blackthorn sold in the streets are beech sticks carved and dyed. It is easy to dye a stick black. Brush it over it with a hot decoction of logwood and nutgalls, and when it is dry give it a brushing with vinegar in which rusty nails have lain for two or three days. If you wish to dye it red, add some dragon’s-blood gum to the polish; if you wish it to be yellow, use ochre instead of dragon’s blood.

All sticks should be cut in the winter and left to dry in the rough in a cool place. If the bark is to come away let the stick be half dry before you begin to work upon it. If the bark is to remain on, let the stick get thoroughly dry before you attempt to trim it.

Ash sticks can be got from the hedge or the thin branches of a pollard, but the best are young saplings taken up root and all, the root coming in handy for carving. Oak sticks are easy to carve, but difficult to dry without splitting; they are the toughest and strongest of all sticks, and are generally got from copse-wood stumps. Holly sticks are best with the bark off; they are best when cut from the secondary branches that shoot up parallel to the main trunk. Sometimes they are found as saplings, and then the roots are retained as groundwork for decoration. Elm sticks are easily got and easily worked, but seldom turn out satisfactorily. Hazel, on the contrary, gives first-rate stick wood, and is soft and easily cut, and if tolerably thick and well dried it will not bend. Blackthorn is the best stick in vogue at what has taken the place of the historic Donnybrook, but there are many tougher and more trustworthy weapons for the peculiar recreation in which it is usually employed. It is an easy stick to prepare and polish, but like case-hardened iron to carve. We are told that those who attempt its carving generally borrow the tools from some unsuspecting friend! _Verb. sap._, or rather _verb._ to those who have dried out its _sap_ and not discovered brittleness. Cherry sticks and apple sticks come easily to hand, and are not unfrequently charred with a hot iron and stained with acids to enable them to be sold as foreigners. Birch and poplar are best left alone. British vines almost always warp; and brier and whitethorn, like all the _Rosaceæ_, have wood that snaps and splinters on the slightest provocation.

To shape a stick use hot sand or steam, and fix it in the desired position when hot. To straighten it lash it when hot to a board, or hang it up with a heavy weight at its end. To dress it or polish it employ one of the methods described in the former part of this section.

When carving a handle, choose some design that will be smooth to the hand. As examples try a man’s head. One of the most extraordinary collections of walking-sticks ever made was formed by Robertson of Kincraigie, who was popularly supposed to be ‘daft.’ It was his practice to carve on his stick the head of any friend or foe he met with, and in time he owned quite a portrait gallery of wooden heads, which proved the cause of much wonderment to his visitors, for every batch he entertained had their features promptly reproduced in oak or hazel! As suitable designs for stick-heads there may be instanced dogs’ heads, birds’ heads, particularly broad-beaked ones, such as goose and albatross, snakes’ heads, fishes, and squirrel and beaver tails. To get good results proper carving tools should be used, cutting up instead of down with the grain; but capital work can be done with an ordinary penknife, the secret of success consisting in never cutting away a chip unless its removal has been well thought over. Carving stick-heads is not like carving panels, and fine work is out of the question with regard to them. There is not much room for improvement in the art. We saw in the 1851 Exhibition a stick carved in China 4,000 years ago, and it was as well done as anything now obtainable from the London stick-seller.