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"We could take up a board." The minister raised his eyebrows. "We could take up a board!" the younger man repeated; and he stepped the mean chamber from end to end, his eyes on the floor. "Or yes, mon Dieu!" with a change of attitude, "we might break through the roof?" And, throwing back his head, he scanned the cobwebbed surface of laths which rested on the unceiled joists. "Umph!"
It has a flooring of laths with ridges of mortar squeezed up between them, which if you tread on you will go to the Lord have mercy on you! where will you go to? the same being crossed by narrow bridges of boards, on which you may put your feet, but with fear and trembling.
He lay in his unplastered room that night, and counted the laths in the moonlight, and built golden ladders out of them by which to climb up to the heaven of his desires. But he was a little troubled to find that in proportion as he came nearer to the possession of Miss Minorkey, his ardor in the matter of his great Educational Institution his American Philanthropinum, as he called it abated.
In a clear vision he saw his own figure in all its lean wretchedness, cut out like a paper silhouette, standing out sharply against the sky, such a miserable little object: two thin legs, like laths, a little stomach, two little sticks of arms and that small, everyday, vulgar head.
It seemed still to believe that there was an upper storey, still to feel that this was a house, there seemed a hope in the twists of that battered staircase that men would yet come again and seek sleep at evening by way of those broken steps; the hand-rail and the banisters streamed down from the top, a woman's dress lolled down from the upper room above those aimless steps, the laths of the ceiling gaped, the plaster was gone; of all the hopes men hope that can never be fulfilled, of all desires that ever come too late, most futile was the hope expressed by that stairway's posture that ever a family would come home there again or tread those steps once more.
Just below the place, in the inner apartment, where Haji Äli might be supposed to lie stretched upon the mat of sickness, the ground was stained a dim red for a space of several inches in circumference. Malay floors are made of laths of wood or of bamboo laid parallel to one another, with spaces between each one of them.
And about them, behind them, rising high above them, thickly set as rushes in a marsh-verge, tall slender wooden tablets, like laths, covered with similar fantastic lettering, pierce the green gloom by thousands, by tens of thousands. And before I can note other details, I know that I am in a hakaba, a cemetery a very ancient Buddhist cemetery.
As there was a door or entrance there into my cave, I made a formal framed door case, and a door to it of boards, and set it up in the passage, a little within the entrance; and causing the door to open in the inside, I barred it up in the night, taking in my ladders too; so that Friday could no way come at me in the inside of my innermost wall, without making so much noise in getting over that it must needs waken me; for my first wall had now a complete roof over it of long poles, covering all my tent, and leaning up to the side of the hill; which was again laid across with smaller sticks, instead of laths, and then thatched over a great thickness with the rice-straw, which was strong, like reeds; and at the hole or place which was left to go in or out by the ladder, I had placed a kind of trap-door, which, if it had been attempted on the outside, would not have opened at all, but would have fallen down, and make a great noise: as to weapons, I took them all into my side every night.
Monasteries and nunneries could not be constructed fast enough, although they contented themselves with the lightest fabrics wattles being the ordinary materials for walls, and slender laths for roofs. Nor was this an ephemeral ardor, like a fire of stubble or straw, flashing into a momentary blaze, to relapse into deeper gloom.
Well, naturally when the fool automatic shut-off fails to work and the overflow pipe is taxed beyond its capacity, the surplus water has to go somewhere. It leaks through the floorin', trickles down between the laths and through the plaster, and some of it finds its way along the beams and under the eaves until it splashes down on the roof of the pantry extension. That's what we'd heard.
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