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The actual, prosaic house in which the Pirates apparently lived, was a mile from a mining settlement on a beautiful ridge of pine woods sloping gently towards a valley on the one side, and on the other falling abruptly into a dark deep olive gulf of pine trees, rocks, and patches of red soil.
And suddenly, coming about the foot of a little knoll, Conniston had his first glimpse of the main canal. Here it was a great ditch, ten feet deep, thirty feet wide, its banks sloping, the earth which had been dragged out of it by the scrapers piled high upon each side in long mounds, like dikes. Truxton stood staring at it, his eyes frowning, his jaw set and stern. "There she is, Conniston.
It was an illusion, perhaps, but it seemed to him that he had been lying at the bottom of a watery trough, and that he was now ascending a sloping surface, broken by little, crumbling waves. He swam slowly and as quietly as possible, taking care to make no splash that might be heard, and he was beginning to believe that he was safe, when he saw a dark blot on the yellow stream.
Now, do you see a little barred window, there, in the face of the rock, through the trees?" "I cannot say I do," I replied. "No. Except you know where it is and even then it is not so easy to find it. I find it by certain trees." "What is it?" "It is the window of a little room in the rock, from which a stair leads down through the rock to a sloping passage.
As I have said before, Hynds House is but two stories high, with deep cellars under it, and an immense attic overhead; an attic all cut up into nooks and corners, and twists and turns, and sloping roofs and dormer windows, and two or three shallow steps going up here, and two or three more going down there, and passages and doors where you'd never look for them.
The house in which this event occurred was a plain, wooden farmhouse of the primitive Virginian pattern, with four rooms on the ground floor, an attic story with a long, sloping roof, and a massive brick chimney. Three years after George Washington's birth it is said to have been burned, and the family for this or some other reason removed to another estate in what is now Stafford County.
Farther up the Columbia, as at the Cascades, a different form was adopted, which is thus described by Captain Clarke: "About half a mile below this house, in a very thick part of the woods, is an ancient Indian burial-place; it consists of eight vaults, made of pine or cedar boards, closely connected, about eight feet square and six in height, the top securely covered with wide boards, sloping a little, so as to convey off the rain.
There was no space for our tents, and trees had to be cut down and a little clearing made. Here the tents were huddled together, clinging to the sloping mountain side. Darkness fell, and then a most wonderful thing happened. One of the tent boys who was searching for firewood in the darkening forest found a little naked baby, barely three months old.
A large pen or corral was made of heavy logs about eight feet high. On the side where the wings of the chute come together, a bridge, or causeway, was built, sloping gently up from the prairie to the walls of the corral, which at this point were cut away to the height of the bridge above the ground, here about four feet, so that the animals running up the causeway could jump down into the corral.
Some careful observers, however, who examined fields for me in Gloucestershire and Staffordshire could not detect any difference in the state of the furrows in the upper and lower parts of sloping fields, supposed to have been long in pasture; and they came to the conclusion that the crowns and furrows would last for an almost endless number of centuries.
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