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From the city to the junction opposite Freeport the river was almost choked with débris of broken and shattered houses. In places the river was fairly black with floating masses of lath, shingles, roofs, floors and other lumber that had formerly been houses. The sight was appalling and spoke louder than any pen can describe.
They lived "across the tracks" in the labor settlement, or in lath and tar-paper shacks about the hills, camping in their eternal campaign of day labor wherever the job happened to take them. Few were married, and all were given more or less to drink and riotous living when pay-day came; and of course they were constantly changing jobs.
I told him to post himself thoroughly upon the qualities and prices of all kinds of lumber, lath, shingles, etc., and to read up the local history of Bangor. To make matters easier for him, I gave him a letter of introduction to a lumber dealer in Greenville, with whom I was well acquainted.
Yussuf returned to the robber, who remained kneeling, and walked round him, crying out with a loud voice, "O sword, if this man be guilty, do thy duty; but if he be, as he has declared in his dying moments, innocent, then become thou harmless." With these words Yussuf drew his sword, and exhibited a lath of palm-wood.
Although I sprang up like a weed in my illness, and was now nearly attained to my full growth of six feet, yet I was but a lath by the side of the enormous English captain, who had calves and shoulders such as no chairman at Bath ever boasted.
"Holdin' down a claim" had proved an occupation as well adapted to his tastes as anything that had ever fallen to his lot, and his bachelor establishment among the boulders was managed with an economy of labor, and a resultant of physical comfort, hitherto unknown in the annals of housekeeping. The house itself was of unsurfaced redwood, battened with lath to keep out the winter rain.
"He's as straight as I am!" cried Dickon. "He's as straight as any lad i' Yorkshire!" What Ben Weatherstaff did Mary thought queer beyond measure. He choked and gulped and suddenly tears ran down his weather-wrinkled cheeks as he struck his old hands together. "Eh!" he burst forth, "th' lies folk tells! Tha'rt as thin as a lath an' as white as a wraith, but there's not a knob on thee.
After the kind of men whom the girl had known, enslaved, and eluded! Absurd! Yet if it were to be Mr. Brewster reviewed the events of the afternoon well, it might be worse. "By the Lord Harry, he's a MAN, anyway!" decided Thatcher Brewster. Meanwhile, the subject of his musings began to feel like a man once more, instead of like a lath. Having wrought havoc among the edibles, he rose with a sigh.
The history of the cottage is this: I found a hut built close to a great live-oak twenty-five feet in girth, and with overarching boughs eighty feet up in the air, spreading like a firmament, and all swaying with mossy festoons. We began to live here, and gradually we improved the hut by lath, plaster, and paper.
As for the chambers and studies, not only were they destitute of anything in the shape of stoves or fire-places, but their walls were absolutely bare, while in the upper chambers there were not even lath and plaster between the tiles and the beams of the roof. It is to us almost incomprehensible how vitality could have been kept up in the winter under such conditions.
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