Hollow Axle Hauling
Dr. G. G. Wilkins tells how Suncook Valley teamsters bored out wooden cart axle-trees with pump-log augers and carried spirits past the county gaugers inside them. He also tells how the deputies finally caught on, because Barnaby the bear would not stop licking the hubs. Retired revenue officer Captain Donald Vance tells three new stories about hidden compartments in wagons and carts. In the call-in segment, Wilkins answers Cletus 'Rabbit' Miller of Wilkesboro, NC, about hickory ashes and red oak shavings in the thump keg, and he strikes coins on his anvil while he knocks down the blue-flame myth.
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Full episode transcript
♦ Audible wax cylinder surface crackle, slow drip of clear distillate into a glass jar
♦ Barnaby the black bear grunting and chain clinking outside log cabin window
Wilkins: Barnaby! Settle your four hundred pounds of sin down in the dirt where it belongs. You had your supper. Half a sheep's head and the Hutchins boy's left boot, and the boy may fetch the boot back any time he likes the smell of bear spit. Down, I said. Down, you hairy tax collector.
♦ Low bear grunt, heavy chain dragging across frozen ground, a thump as the bear flops down
Wilkins: That is a good bear. A terrible bear, but a good one.
♪ 1860s parlor banjo and mountain fiddle theme with antique warmth, swells, then fades under
Wilkins: Good evening, neighbors, sinners, and any county deputy who has his ear pressed to my chinking. You are listening to Radio Moonshine with Alchemist G. G. Wilkins, coming to you from the log fortress of Fort Wilkins on the Suncook Valley Turnpike, Route 28, here in Pittsfield, Merrimack County, New Hampshire. I am your host, Doctor George G. Wilkins: dentist, blacksmith, inventor, coin-stamper, keeper of one very ill-mannered bear, and twice a guest of the Merrimack County sheriff, who serves a worse supper than the bear does. Tonight's subject is near to my heart and nearer to my wagon shed. We are talking about Hollow Axle Hauling, the cart trick that carried more spirit down this valley than the Suncook carries water in a dry August, and how those fool deputies finally worked it out. But first, a word from the man with the loud waistcoat.
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♪ Short fiddle sting
Wilkins: SEGMENT ONE. The Humble Axle-Tree, and How It Got Ambitious.
♦ Wax crackle, a log shifting in the hearth
Wilkins: Now, if you have never crawled under a farm cart, and from the look of most of you, you have only crawled under tables, let me tell you what holds it up. It is the axle-tree. That is a stout square beam of hickory, white oak, or hard maple, laid crosswise under the bed. At each end it tapers down to a round arm, and the wheel rides on that arm. A good wheelwright sleeves the arm in an iron skein so the wood does not wear to splinters, and he holds the wheel on with a linchpin, an iron peg driven through a hole in the axle end. Pull the linchpin and the wheel walks off down the road on its own errands, like a husband at a cattle show.
Wilkins: Hanging beneath every cart in this valley you will find a tar bucket, a little pail of pine tar and tallow swinging like a drunk's lantern, and it is usually the soberest thing on the whole rig. You dab that grease on the arms every few miles or the axle screams like a widow at the reading of a will. Mark that. A dry axle squeals, and a squealing axle says something. Hold that thought, because it comes back to bite a deputy, and I mean bite.
Wilkins: A wooden axle-tree is the one member of a farm family that carries the whole load, never complains, and never asks for a drink. So naturally we filled it with one.
Wilkins: Here is the history of it. When Washington put his collectors and assessors in every district and sent gaugers around with their long brass-tipped rods to measure every cask and barrel, the barrel became a confession. A gauger walks up to a cart, sees a cask, sticks in his rod, and figures the tax right there in his little book with a pencil he licks between sums. But no gauger in Merrimack County ever thought to put his rod in a wheel. A gauger can count barrels, but he cannot count past the obvious.
Wilkins: Now, how do you hollow a solid beam of hickory without splitting it like a bad marriage? You borrow from the pump-log men. Neighbors, before anybody dreamed of iron water mains, half the villages in New England got their water through pine logs bored end to end. The log-borers used an auger longer than a tall man, with a T-handle you lean your whole belly on, and they walk that auger down the heart of the log a few inches at a time, pulling out the shavings, sighting down the hole, cussing, and going again. I had the loan of one from a fellow at the mills at the falls who asked no questions, because I had pulled two of his teeth and he owed me the third.
Wilkins: You bore the axle-tree from one end, straight down the middle, leaving good thick wood all around so she still bears the load. Then, and listen close, because this is where the fools killed people, you do not let the spirit sit in raw wood. Raw hickory drinks spirit like a deacon at a wake and gives back tannin, color, and the taste of a fence post. So you line the bore. I drew a seamless copper tube in this very shop, slid it home, and sealed the ends with a threaded plug behind the linchpin hole, waxed with beeswax and capped with a dab of tar so it looks like every other greasy axle end in Christendom. No lead. Not a speck. I will come back to that too, and it will not be funny when I do.
Wilkins: Now let us do some honest arithmetic, which is more than the Treasury ever does. The American gallon is the old wine gallon of Queen Anne's day, two hundred thirty-one cubic inches. A bore about two and a half inches across, running five feet, gives you near a gallon and a quarter. Two axles to a wagon, so call it two gallons and a half. Now, a man does not get rich on two gallons and a half. He gets rich by making that trip forty times a season while the gauger waves at him from the tavern porch.
Wilkins: And it rode sweet. It rode sweeter than a Concord coach, and you know what the Abbot-Downing boys build down in Concord. Their coach hangs on leather thoroughbraces instead of steel springs, so she rocks like a cradle, and the passengers come off her looking like they were raised in one by wolves. My carts rocked too, but only the cargo knew it.
♦ Wax crackle; distant bear grunt
Wilkins: Hush, Barnaby, I am getting to your part.
♪ Banjo bridge, a jaunty run of notes
Wilkins: SEGMENT TWO. Legends, Outlaws, and the Day the Axle Talked.
Wilkins: My finest hauler was a man named Hosea Brackett. He is long gone to his reward, and I suspect the reward was a fine. Hosea had a face like a dropped pie and the morals of a wet cat, and he was the best teamster that ever cussed an ox up Catamount Hill. He ran a rattling old two-wheel cart with a load of cordwood, or turnips, or once a dead calf for the tannery, piled on top as an honest-looking excuse. Under all that honest excuse, two gallons and a half of my best was sloshing gently inside the hickory.
Wilkins: For two seasons nobody suspected a thing. Then the county hired a new deputy, a long thin article named Lemuel Fogg, with a neck like a plucked heron and a nose that could smell a lie through a feather tick. Fogg noticed three things, and I will grant him all three, because a man ought to respect a good tooth even when he has to pull it.
Wilkins: First, ruts. In mud season Hosea's empty cart, coming home with nothing aboard, cut ruts on the turnpike as deep as a cart full of granite. An empty cart that cuts ruts like a load of granite is either carrying contraband or carrying a lawyer's conscience, and only one of those is heavy.
Wilkins: Second, the sound. You come down off the hill over the frost heaves, and a solid axle goes thunk. Hosea's went glunk. That is a wet sound, neighbors. That is a sound with a cork in it.
Wilkins: But third, and this is the one that hanged us, so to speak, was Barnaby. Every time Hosea pulled that cart into my yard, Barnaby would rise up off his haunches, drag his chain to the limit, and lick the axle ends. Lick them like a schoolboy licks the molasses spoon. Lick off the tar, lick off the tallow, and keep licking at the linchpin hole long after there was nothing left but the smell of what was inside. Fogg lay out in the alders across the road three nights watching this, and on the third night he said to himself, as he later testified, 'No bear loves axle grease that devoted.'
♦ Bear grunt, chain clinking, something wet and slobbery
Wilkins: So on the fourth night, Lemuel Fogg made the mistake that every clever man makes. He came to confirm his suspicion personally. He crept up out of the alders in his good county coat, crouched down behind Hosea's cart, and put his ear to the axle-tree to hear it glunk. And he crouched within reach of the chain.
Wilkins: Now, I have pulled a great many teeth, and I know what a man sounds like when he is surprised by pain. Fogg made a new sound. Barnaby hooked one claw in the collar of that county coat and drew it straight down his back to the belt, slow and deliberate, and opened him along the backbone like a man slitting a letter. The letter said the county doesn't pay enough. You could hear the wool go first, a long ripping like a sail tearing, then the shirt, then the sound of a skinny man discovering he has skin. Fogg went off like a steam whistle in a hog yard. They heard him at the mills at the falls and thought it was the noon shift.
Wilkins: Then Barnaby sat on him. Four hundred pounds settled across Fogg's legs like a bad mortgage, and that bear commenced to lick the tar and tallow off Fogg's boots, which he had smeared crawling under the cart. Lick, lick, slurp, with Fogg flat on his face in the frozen mud, bleeding a long red stripe down his back and calling on his mother, the Governor, and the Book of Daniel. By the time I came out with a lantern and a ham bone to bribe the bear off him, Fogg had bitten a fence rail in his agony and cracked a molar clean in half.
Wilkins: So I hauled him inside, sat him in my dental chair, sewed up his back with dental silk, eleven stitches, pulled the broken molar for good measure, and poured him a medicinal measure to steady him. I charged him nothing, and he called it the only honest bargain he ever struck in Pittsfield. And then, being an honest man to the last, he went straight back to Concord and swore out the whole business.
Wilkins: They came back by daylight with two more deputies and a bucket. They pulled the linchpin, pulled the plug, and my good spirit ran out of that axle into the county bucket like the blood out of Fogg. They did not arrest Hosea. Hosea swore up and down it was 'axle oil of a superior grade,' and the magistrate could not find a statute against superior axle oil. They confiscated the axle-tree and auctioned it on the courthouse steps, and I bought it back for forty cents. That is the only tax I ever paid gladly. It hangs over my door to this day, and Barnaby still licks it when he thinks I am not looking.
Wilkins: Now, my guest tonight has crawled under more carts than a lost hound, and he is a revenue man, retired, so I am told he has given up his sins and kept only his opinions. He spent a long career in the federal service chasing copper through the White Mountains and the Green, and he is the only revenue man Barnaby has ever let walk up my path with all his limbs. Welcome to Fort Wilkins, Captain Donald Vance.
Captain: Thank you, Doctor. I will say your bear looked me up and down like a butcher looks at a heifer, and I have never been so glad to be thin and stringy.
Wilkins: He prefers deputies. They are marbled with lard from county suppers. Captain, you have the face of a man who has arrested half of Vermont and been forgiven by all of it. Tell me true. When you hear 'hollow axle,' what does a revenue man's heart do?
Captain: It sinks, Doctor, because it means you have to get down in the mud. A barrel you can see. A false-bottomed box you can thump with your knuckles. But the running gear of a wagon is all wood and iron and grease, and every bit of it looks alike to a man who isn't paying attention. So you learn to pay attention with your ears.
Wilkins: Your ears. Go on.
Captain: I carried a hickory walking stick with a brass ferrule, and I tapped everything. Sound wood rings. You give a solid wagon hub a rap and it says tock, clean and high, like a good bell in a small church. Well, sir, there was a farmer coming down out of the Franconia country with a spare wheel lashed to his tailboard, and I tapped it out of habit, not suspicion. And it said thud. Low and dead, like knocking on a coffin that's already occupied.
Wilkins: Ha! The wheel confessed.
Captain: The wheel confessed and the farmer didn't. He told me the hub was 'waterlogged from the spring freshet.' I asked him why a wheel he kept dry on his tailboard should be waterlogged, and he said it was 'a very thirsty wheel.' Well, we pried a little wooden bung out of the hub face, cut flush and painted over, and that hub had been carved out hollow as a gourd. Near three quarts of applejack in there, and to his credit, he'd lined it with a stoneware crock fitted snug in the bore. Somebody had spent a whole winter on that hub.
Wilkins: A winter's whittling and a summer's profit. That is New England in a nutshell. Or a hub-shell.
Captain: Now, the ears are good, but I'll tell you who's better at the job than any revenue man ever lived. Cats.
Wilkins: Cats?
Captain: Barn cats, Doctor. There was a milk route over in Vermont, a man driving cans down to the cheese factory every morning. I was watching that road on a different matter entirely, and I noticed something peculiar. Every farmyard he stopped at, the barn cats came pouring out to wind around the milk cans, mewing and begging the way cats do. Except for one can. One can, they wouldn't go within a rod of it. Walked wide around it with their tails puffed up like bottle brushes.
Wilkins: A cat knows more about a milk can than a revenue man does.
Captain: And that's the first honest testimony a revenue man ever gave on your program, I expect. So I lifted the lid, and there was milk all right, about an inch of it, in a ring. Somebody had sweated a sealed tin cylinder down inside the can, with a narrow gap all the way round, and filled just that gap with milk so a man looking in would see white. The cylinder in the middle held a good four gallons of corn whiskey. The cats could smell that spirit through the tin and the cream both, and they wanted no part of it.
Wilkins: Smarter than half my patients. What did you do with the dairyman?
Captain: I wrote him up, and I told him the cats had turned state's evidence. He said he'd never trusted them anyway.
Wilkins: Now Captain, you are smiling, but I hear there's a story where you didn't smile.
Captain: There is. And it goes to what you said earlier about lead, Doctor, and I'm glad you said it. There was a tin peddler, one of those fellows with a wagon hung all over with pans and dippers, clanging like a fire brigade. His horse was a sorry old bay that walked like every step was a personal insult. Something about that horse bothered me. He was pulling a light wagon of tinware, and he was leaning into the collar like he was hauling a church.
Wilkins: The horse knew.
Captain: The horse knew, and the horse looked at me as if to say, finally. So I asked two of my men to lift the wagon tongue, the long pole that runs up between the horse and the wagon. Two grown men, and they could barely budge the end of it. That tongue had been bored the whole length, and when we drew the plug we found he'd lined it with old lead water pipe he'd salvaged from some torn-down house.
Wilkins: Oh, the damned fool.
Captain: The peddler told me the weight was 'ballast for the horse's moral improvement.' I told him the only thing that pipe would improve was the undertaker's business. Spirit sitting in lead, sloshing up and down those roads for weeks, takes up that poison, Doctor. I've seen men come down sick from that kind of hauling, gray and shaking, with their bellies in knots. So I poured out every drop on the roadside, right there. It is the only time in my life I was glad to waste good-smelling liquor.
Wilkins: And I'll lay odds the grass on that spot never grew back, which is more remorse than the peddler ever showed.
Captain: It didn't, as a matter of fact. Bare as a magistrate's heart for three summers.
Wilkins: Captain, I want the listeners to hear this from a revenue man as well as from me. Whatever a man thinks of the law, the law is not the worst thing that can happen to him. Bad metal is.
Captain: That's the truth. I could respect a man who lined his axle with clean copper or good stoneware, even while I was writing his name in my book. The ones who used lead weren't outlaws, Doctor. They were poisoners who didn't know it yet.
Wilkins: Well said, and I hate agreeing with you. Captain Donald Vance, retired, ladies and gentlemen. Barnaby, let the man pass unmolested.
♦ Bear grunt, chain clinks, then a sniff
Captain: He's sniffing my boots, Doctor.
Wilkins: You walked through my tar shed. Move along briskly and do not crouch.
♪ Fiddle flourish into a lively patent-medicine march
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♪ March ends on a brassy chord
Wilkins: SEGMENT THREE. Copper and the Craft. What Goes in the Pot, What Comes Out, and What Never Should.
♦ Wax crackle; a copper lid lifted and set down with a soft ring
Wilkins: Now that the Captain has scared the lead out of you, let me walk you through the craft proper, start to finish, the way I would teach an apprentice who had all his fingers and meant to keep them. First, the law. Making drinking spirits without a federal permit is against the law of the United States, and everything on this program is history and instruction, not an invitation. Now, to the work.
Wilkins: Step one, the mash. You take cracked corn, cook it in water until it goes soft and porridgy, and let it cool until you can hold your hand in it without cussing. Pitch in your yeast, cover it with a cloth so the flies keep their opinions to themselves, and set it somewhere warm with good air moving through. In some days, depending on the weather and the yeast's mood, it quits bubbling and settles, and you have a thin sour beer we call the wash. It is not strong. A few parts in a hundred is spirit. All the still does is gather those few parts together and leave the rest behind.
Wilkins: Step two, the charge and the fire. You strain your wash into the pot, leaving the solids behind as best you can, because thick grain on a hot pot bottom scorches and gives you a spirit that tastes like a burned barn. Set the helmet on and run the arm to your worm in the cold-water barrel. And now hear me, because this is how men die. A pot still is never sealed tight. Never. It must always have a free path out through the worm. And you bring the fire up slow. If you fire her hard, the wash foams and climbs up the neck and boils over into the arm. We call that a puke. When a still pukes, it is like a deputy at a hanging: it makes a terrible mess and it blocks the only way out. A clogged arm on a hot pot builds pressure, and a pot under pressure is a bomb with a handle. You stay with your still. A man who walks off from a lit still to go see about a horse comes back to see about his eyebrows, or does not come back at all. Alcohol vapor catches from an open flame in a heartbeat, so keep your joints tight, keep the vapor away from the firebox, and keep a bucket of sand close by.
Wilkins: Step three, the cuts. This is where the craftsman earns his bread and the fool earns his blindness. First out of the worm come the foreshots, a small measure at the very start, sharp and nasty. Into the waste with them, every drop, never into a man's mouth. Next come the heads, which smell like a varnish pot or a hatter's shop, a sharp solvent stink that grabs the back of your nose. Those you set aside and do not drink. Then the smell turns sweet and clean and round, and the spirit runs bright off the worm. Those are the hearts, and that is your keeping spirit. Last come the tails, which go oily and flat and smell like a wet dog that rolled in porridge. Those you put by to run again another day. You judge by small jars, one after another, and by your nose, and you cut early rather than late. When in doubt, throw it out, and let your pride take the loss and not your liver.
Wilkins: Step four, the copper's quiet work. Copper is not on that still because it looks handsome, though it does. Wherever the hot vapor touches bare copper, up in the helmet, the neck, and the swan's-neck arm, the copper grabs hold of the stinking sulfur in the vapor and keeps it. Scrub the inside of a still after a run and you will see dark grime come off on your rag. That grime is the rotten-egg stink that never made it to the jar. That is why you keep the inside of your still bright. Dull copper is a lazy workman.
Wilkins: Step five, and here we come back round to the axle. Spirit takes on the character of whatever it sits in. Put it in sound white oak and it takes color and sweetness over time. Put it in glass or good stoneware and it stays as you made it. But a man who stores spirit in a zinc pail or galvanized iron wants his whiskey to taste like the inside of a stovepipe and his funeral to come early. Zinc, lead, and cheap mongrel metals leach into what they hold. Even my axle tube was copper, kept clean and kept short. Spirit went in at my door and came out at the buyer's, and it never sat in metal longer than the trip.
♦ Distant bear grunt
Wilkins: Barnaby agrees. Barnaby always agrees when the subject is liquid.
♪ Banjo bridge, slower and sly
Wilkins: SEGMENT FOUR. Myths, Slang, and the Call-In Line.
Wilkins: We have a recording come all the way up from the Carolina hills, from the Yadkin River country, where they have been arguing about thump kegs since before my grandfather lost his first argument. Crank it up.
♦ Wax cylinder playback hiss, a click, faint tinny room tone
Wilkins: This is Cletus 'Rabbit' Miller of Wilkesboro, North Carolina, and he asks: 'Alchemist, my uncle swears old-timers used to throw hickory ashes or red oak shavings into the thump keg to clean out bad heads. Is there any truth to that, or was he just making swamp medicine?'
♦ Playback click off; wax crackle
Wilkins: Rabbit! Bless your long ears and your uncle's short memory. Let me take your uncle's two medicines one at a time, and I'll put a coin under the punch for every truth, so you can count them.
♦ Steel punch clangs on copper coin
Wilkins: Truth the first. Hickory ashes. Rabbit, your granny, if she was any kind of granny, kept an ash hopper out back, a wooden trough of hardwood ashes. She poured water through it and caught the brown drip at the bottom, and that drip is lye, potash, the stuff you boil with grease to make soft soap. Hickory ash is about the finest lye ash there is. So when your uncle pitches hickory ashes into a hot thump keg, he is not cleaning the spirit. He is making soap. That keg will foam like a mad dog, the spirit comes off tasting like washday, and the bad heads, the sharp, wicked part, come right on through as bold as a tax collector. Rabbit, if you pour lye in your thump keg you will not clean the spirit, but you may wash your uncle's britches, and from what I hear they need it.
♦ Steel punch clangs on copper coin
Wilkins: Truth the second. Red oak shavings. Ask any cooper why he won't build a whiskey cask out of red oak and he will hand you a short stick of it, tell you to put your lips on one end, and blow. The air comes out the other end. Red oak is full of open pores like a sponge. White oak is plugged tight inside, which is why white oak holds spirit and red oak leaks. Red oak holds spirit the way a Merrimack sheriff holds a secret: it leaks out every side and smells of it for a week. Now, shavings of oak in hot spirit will give you color, tannin, and a woody taste, and a man might mistake that for improvement, the way a man mistakes a fancy waistcoat for character. But it is flavoring, Rabbit, not cleaning.
♦ Steel punch clangs on copper coin
Wilkins: Truth the third, and this one is not a joke. The thump keg is a second boiling. It makes the spirit stronger, and that is all it does. It is not a sieve, a filter, or a priest. The bad heads your uncle is worried about can only be got rid of one way: you watch the worm, you catch the foreshots and the heads in their own jars, and you throw them away. No ash, no shaving, no prayer, and no North Carolina uncle can take the poison out of the spirit after it has gone in. The cut is the cure. There is no other.
Wilkins: So, Rabbit, your uncle was making swamp medicine, but it was honest swamp medicine, in the sense that he believed it. Tell him Doc Wilkins of Pittsfield says to keep the hickory ash for his soap and the red oak for his firewood, and to keep his hands on the cuts. And Rabbit Miller, of Wilkesboro, North Carolina, this coin's for you.
♦ Steel punch clangs on copper coin, the coin rings and spins on the anvil face
Wilkins: G. G. WILKINS, PITTSFIELD N.H., struck fresh. If you're ever up the Suncook Valley Turnpike, come claim it. Bring a ham bone for the doorman.
♦ Bear grunt, interested
Wilkins: Not you. You are the doorman, and the ham bone is your fee. Now, while I've got the punch warm, let me knock down one more old foolishness, the Blue Flame.
Wilkins: You have seen it in every tavern from Portsmouth to the Connecticut River. Some sage pours a spoonful of spirit, puts a match to it, and says, 'Burns blue, it's good. Burns yellow or red, there's poison in it.' And the whole table nods like geese.
♦ Steel punch clangs on copper coin
Wilkins: Hogwash! The wood spirit, the methanol, the very devil you're afraid of, burns too, and it burns with a pale blue flame you can hardly see by daylight. So your spoonful of poison can burn just as pretty a blue as your spoonful of hearts. The flame tells you that there is alcohol in the spoon. It tells you nothing about which alcohol, and nothing about whether it will blind you. A blue flame proves your liquor burns, and so does my barn, and I would not drink either one on that evidence. The only test worth a cent is an honest cut made by an honest nose at the worm.
♦ Steel punch clangs on copper coin
Wilkins: And that one's for the sage at the tavern, who owes me for three spoons.
♪ Short fiddle sting
Announcer: One more quick word, friends! If you want clean copper that's built honest, see the Fort Wilkins 2-Gallon Tabletop Mini-Still, at two hundred eighty-nine dollars, at our Route 28 showroom in Pittsfield, or explore Tabletop Stills at moonshinestill.com!
♪ Parlor banjo and mountain fiddle theme returns softly underneath
Wilkins: SIGN-OFF.
Wilkins: Well, neighbors, the fire is down to coals, the jar is near full, and Barnaby is snoring like a sawmill with a cracked blade. If tonight's talk of cuts and copper has put a spark in you, and I mean the useful kind of spark, not the kind that burns your shed down, then enroll in the Alchemist G. G. Wilkins Distilling Course. I'll teach you the history, the copper, the mash, and the cuts the way an old blacksmith-dentist learned them: by hand, by nose, and by surviving his own mistakes. Mind the law, mind your metal, and mind your fire.
Wilkins: My thanks to Captain Donald Vance, the only revenue man ever to leave Fort Wilkins with his coat in one piece. My thanks to Rabbit Miller down in Wilkesboro, whose uncle I'd like to meet and then argue with. And my thanks to the late Hosea Brackett, his glunking axle, and Deputy Lemuel Fogg, whose eleven stitches I remember fondly, though he doesn't. I've been arrested by better men than the county sends now, and bitten by a better bear than any of them, and I keep them all in my prayers, though not in the same paragraph.
Wilkins: Keep your copper clean, your cuts honest, and your fire low. Goodnight from Fort Wilkins.
♦ Bear grunt and final drip into jar
♪ Theme rises, a last banjo roll and a held fiddle note, then fades into wax cylinder crackle and silence