Charley smiled, but did not answer him. "The other reason why I don't like a cat-boat is that she won't work to windward with her peak dropped. If you are sailing in a wind, no matter how hard it blows, you must keep the peak up, or you can't keep the boat from falling off. I don't care how many rows of reef-points the sailmaker may have put on the sail, you can't reduce it to more than half its original size if you expect the boat to beat to windward. If a cat-boat is caught in a heavy gale blowing directly off shore, she can't carry sail enough to work into the lee of the land, and she is liable to be blown a hundred miles out to sea." "What kind of a boat ought we to have, then?" inquired Tom, who did not understand everything that Charley said, but who knew that he must be right. "A jib-and-mainsail boat, of course," replied Charley. "If you have to scud, you can scud all day under your jib, and keep as dry as a bone, and you can work her to windward with the mainsail close reefed. If you have your jib sheets led aft, the boat can be handled by one man just as easy as a cat-boat. The only thing a cat-boat is good for is sailing in a dead calm on a mud-bank." "But how can you sail if there's a dead calm?" asked Tom. "What we ought to do with that boat," Charley continued, "is to step her mast about eighteen inches aft of where it is stepped now. Then we can rig out a bowsprit and put a jib on her. She ought to be lengthened at the stern too, so that we could reach the end of the boom and put in a reef without going ashore to do it." "We might make the bowsprit ourselves," said Tom; "but we couldn't lengthen her ourselves, and it would cost a good deal to get it done." "I'll undertake to lengthen her myself," said Charley. "It won't cost us anything but the price of a few nails and some pieces of wood." "How on earth would you go to work?" cried Jim. "Do you mean to saw her in two, put a piece in, and nail her together again?" "Perhaps," said Joe, "he means to steam her, and then stretch her. If you can bend wood by steaming it, you ought to be able to stretch it." [Illustration: BUILDING THE "OVERHANG."] "I'll show you what I mean if you fellows will only pay attention," replied Charley. "Now here's her transom, this flat board at her stern, where her name ought to be painted. You see it's all above water, and that the end of every plank is nailed to it. Now the first thing to do is to take four pieces of joist--I believe that's what carpenters call it--about four inches square, and bolt them to the transom. You want to put them about six inches apart, and they must be just as long as the transom is deep." "I don't quite understand," said Tom, "what you mean by saying they must be as long as the transom is deep." "I mean that each piece that you bolt on must reach from the level of the deck, that is, from the top of the transom, to the lower edge of the transom." "Oh, now I understand," exclaimed Tom.