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Sometimes a small dead birch contains in the waterproof envelope of its bark a species of powdery, dry touchwood that takes the flame readily. Still, it is easy enough to start a blaze a very fine-looking, cheerful, healthy blaze; the difficulty is to prevent its petering out the moment your back is turned.
As thus: "If your father, Bart, had lived longer, he might have been worth a deal of money you brimstone chatterer! but just as he was beginning to build up the house that he had been making the foundations for, through many a year you jade of a magpie, jackdaw, and poll-parrot, what do you mean! he took ill and died of a low fever, always being a sparing and a spare man, full of business care I should like to throw a cat at you instead of a cushion, and I will too if you make such a confounded fool of yourself! and your mother, who was a prudent woman as dry as a chip, just dwindled away like touchwood after you and Judy were born you are an old pig.
Clearings had all ended, and the red land formed broken waves of poor soil, almost nude of vegetation at this mid-winter of the tropics, except thickets of "milk plant" and forests of quadrangular cactus; the latter are quaint as the dragon-tree, some twenty feet tall and mostly sun-scorched to touchwood.
The road was a difficult one, and our progress was but slow, being often impeded by a morass or by the trunk of a tree which had fallen right across the path, and was now rapidly rotting into touchwood under the influence of the damp atmosphere and incessant rain.
There is hardly a more pitiable degradation than this for a man of high gifts. Hence I cannot join with those who wish that Touchwood, being young enough to enter on public life, should get elected for Parliament and use his excellent abilities to serve his country in that conspicuous manner.
Seeing us with our parcels, he threw down his tackle, roared a sigh, and said, "That wood! It's touchwood, yes. A butter-wire's the only thing for cutting that!" He stood up, discouraged; then changing his idea, and lighted from below by his lamp so that he flamed in the evening, he extended his tawny-edged arm and struck me on the shoulder. "We said war, war, all along.
"Hullo, old man," he said in a husky, low voice. "You've pulled through?" "Yes," I replied. "But 'touchwood'! I'm so sorry. Anyway, you're all right for 'Blighty," and to cheer him up I continued in a bantering strain: "You knew how to manage it, eh? Jolly artful, you know." His face lighted up with a wan smile. "Yes, Malins, rather a long 'Blighty, I'm afraid."
The local remedy was a drastic one: it was to place a piece of lighted touchwood on the most inflamed part, and to leave it there till the flesh was burnt to the nerve! In the north and the regions round Hudson's Bay, and also in the far west British Columbia and Alaska there were dogs, more or less of the Eskimo breed, trained by Eskimo or by Amerindians to drag the sledges.
A line running direct from the Touchwood Hills to Edmonton House would measure 500 miles in length, yet would lie altogether within the country of the Plain Crees.
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