Their Masterpiece

No good, Jack,” said Jake, lifting the curtain and coming out of the darkness with a dripping glass plate. “Balloon, she was whipping along too fast.”

The aerial view of Concord’s Milldam was a blur. “Too bad, Jake,” said Jack.

Jake ducked back into the darkness, dropping the curtain behind him. Five minutes later, he came out with another plate in his hand and a broad smile on his face. “Looky here, Jack,” he said, holding it up in the sunlight.

Jack gazed at it with his artist’s eye. “Truly beauteous, Jake. What town is that? I forget.”

“That there’s Nashoba, Jack. See the big tree stump? Remember that there stump?”

“I sure do, Jake. Biggest old stump I ever beheld.”

Jake took back the plate and looked at it proudly. “This here’s our masterpiece, Jack. We got to spread it around.”

“Mayors and selectmen, they got to see it, Jake. City councillors and so on. They take one look, they’ll all want aerial views of their own premises, courtesy of Jack and Jacob Spratt.”

“What about newspapers, Jack? Evening Transcript? Boston Advertiser? Whoopsie, I forgot. This here’s a photograph.”

“I’ll copy it, Jake. An engraving. Newspapers, they’ll print an engraving.”

Jake laughed and slapped his brother on the back. It was clear that the inborn talents of the Spratt brothers—Jake’s mechanical genius and Jack’s nimble artistic fingers—were complementing each other once again.

It took Jack a week to turn the darks and lights of Jake’s masterful photograph into spidery cross-hatchings. Then it was another week before the masterpiece of the Spratt brothers appeared on the front page of the Boston Evening Transcript, under the heading, ASTONISHING AERIAL VIEW.

The roof and steeple of the Nashoba church showed clearly in the engraving and so did the burying ground, with the great white disk of the fallen tree among the tombstones.

The Transcript was an evening paper. Not till midafternoon did a newsboy hustle down Charles Street and toss a copy on the doorstep of number 164. The thump was a signal for the master of the house to hurry downstairs from his study, throw open the door, pick up the paper, and learn, to his horror, of the death by willful murder of his favorite chestnut tree. With an exclamation of disgust, Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes, medical man, poet, raconteur, and worshiper of gigantic trees, stared at the engraved view of the lopped stump in the Nashoba burying ground.

The atrocity called for action. Dr. Holmes ran upstairs, sat down at his desk, moved aside his microscope, sharpened his pen, and dipped it in the inkwell. At once, the furious lines came freely, as if flung down by themselves. Stanza after savage stanza streamed out of his pen in perfect alternating beats of four and three.

Within the hour, the deed was done. Smiling at the facility of his genius, Holmes waited only a moment for the ink to dry. Then he folded his rhymed revenge upon the slayer of the great Nashoba chestnut and thrust it into an envelope addressed to “Josephus Gill, Editor, Boston Evening Transcript.” Josephus was an old friend. He would not cavil at this unasked-for submission from a celebrated contributor. The clever verses would appear within the week, doubtless on the very first page.

Far away among the outlying villages to the west, delivery of the Transcript was delayed, since it had to be carried by railroad. At the depot in Concord, it was tossed out of the mail car into a waiting wagon. Newsboys snatched up bundles for delivery to Cutler’s store on the Milldam and to individual subscribers on Main Street and all the way out the North Road. Bundles destined for Carlisle, Acton, and Nashoba went by coach.

Therefore, the Nashoba parsonage did not receive a copy of the paper that had so scandalized Dr. Holmes until the next morning. Horatio Biddle unfolded the paper at the breakfast table and gasped at the masterpiece of the brothers Spratt. There it was in black and white, their aerial view of the Nashoba churchyard. The glaring round spot in the center was the stump of the murdered tree.