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With the carpenters remained the task of arranging in the form of a raft the many venerable trees which were lying on the strand. And an easy task it was. Under the direction of Joam Garral the Indians displayed their incomparable ingenuity. In everything connected with house-building or ship-building these natives are, it must be admitted, astonishing workmen.
A few paddles, especially those made for women, are very finely shaped and finished, and have their shafts ornamented with carving of a variety of designs, generally one band of carving immediately above the blade and a second below the cross-piece. House-building
He did not mind fishing or climbing a cocoa-nut tree, which he did to admiration by passing a rope round himself and the tree, knotting it, and using it as a support during the climb; but house-building was monotonous work. He said he had no nails. Dick countered by showing how the canes could be held together by notching them.
When I look back to the conditions that existed on this bit of Lake-front three years ago the frog-hollows, tiling, the wasting bluffs, excavation, thirty-five cords of boulders unloaded perversely the mere enumeration chafes like grit upon surfaces still sore.... I have sadly neglected the study of house-building in this book. It would not do now.
House-building went on, though there was no church-building, and we admire greatly some of those grand mansions which were reared in the time of Elizabeth and the early Stuarts; but art was declining, a crumbling taste causing disintegration of the sense of real beauty and refinement of detail.
These were calamus, bloodroot, snakeroot, slippery elm, tansy, and scores that I do not remember the names of. There was sumach for tanning and butternut for dyeing; hickory wood for our fires and hard black walnut for our house-building and fences. Everything that we needed for comfort or health was within reach of our hands. Nor in this wholesome simple life were the arts forgotten.
And no child, stormily demanding a cookie "between meals," was ever more subtly diverted into an interest in house-building than was I when I found an apparently imperative demand had disappeared without my noticing it.
Surely nowhere, save in the histories of the great Boston and Chicago fires, is record to be found of parallel pluck and determination! House-building was not half so easy in this part of the wood where he then was, for the bushes were thick and stood closely together.
Although the earth of this country if tempered for house-building will crumble in the rain, the hills of the white ants remain solid and waterproof, owing to the glue in the cement. I have seen three varieties of white ants the largest about the size of a small wasp: this does not attack dwellings, but subsists upon fallen trees.
This manner of building is so simple that a house can be erected without any other instruments than an axe, an auger, and a large chisel; and the speed with which it is put up would surprise those whose notions of house-building are limited to stone edifices. The axes of the wood-cutters resounded among the gullies and ravines of Ungava, and awakened the numerous echoes of the mountains.
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