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Round this stood a colony of roughly-built huts, of mud, turf, or large blocks of the slate. Many workmen were engaged in splitting up the slates, or loading wagons with them, rude wild-looking men, at the sight of whom the ladies shrank up to their protectors, but who seemed too busy even to spare time for staring at them.
"A pretty kind of school!" growled Johnny. "Don't they do anything out there in Hindoo but just fan themselves?" "O, we pretend these fans are green, just off the trees. Indian boys don't know what slates are. They think these leaves are good enough. They come off of the tallest palm trees. Fans don't grow in this country. Where did you ever see a leaf as broad as this?"
I generally employ a course of slates, breaking joint with a good bed of cement above and below; it answers well, and is not very expensive. If the ground is irregular, a layer of asphalt is more easily applied. Gas tar and sand are sometimes used, but it deteriorates and cannot be depended upon for any length of time.
You can imagine they weren't complimentary, and one day the parson came to the school, and we stood up in class with slates to do sums, and on the back of my slate was one of the very strongest of my first attempts at cartooning. It was a hot one." And at the remembrance Ford laughed so contagiously that they all joined. "The parson happened to see it. By gum! It was worth everything to see him."
The grunsteins, which begin again to the south of these slates, appear to me to differ little from those found north of the ravine of Piedras Azules. I did not see there any pyroxene; but on the very spot I recognized a number of crystals in the amygdaloid, which appears so strongly linked to the grunstein that they alternate several times.
But how are we going to stop him?" "That's just what I'm coming to. When the time comes to read the answers I'm going to take up the slates, just as if mine was down first; and then, if Levi's been playing sharp on us, I'll expose him." "What a brick you are!" exclaimed Bert, admiringly, patting Frank on the back.
But even so, I would like to feel at home on my own roof and have a slippered familiarity with my slates and spouts. A chimney-sweep in the old days doubtless had an ugly occupation, and the fear of a sooty death must have been recurrent to him.
The house-martin is a really clever builder; he takes little mouthfuls of clay in his beak and sticks them one by one under the deep overhanging tiles or slates of a house or barn, and gradually forms a complete nest like a ball of clay, which dries hard, and is stuck against the wall, with only one opening like a lip at the top.
I see it all, just as though it were before me now. THE next morning, although I had gone to bed so late the night before, I was up frightfully early. The first sparrows were just beginning to chirp sleepily on the slates outside my attic window when I jumped out of bed and scrambled into my clothes.
But as the love for decorations arose, he would deck his roofs as nature had decked hers, till the gray sheets of the cathedral slates should stand out amid pinnacles and turrets rich with foliage, as the gray mountain-sides stood out amid knolls of feathery birch and towering pine. He failed, though he failed nobly. He never succeeded in attaining a perfectly natural style.