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At our approach two hags stalked forth with lanterns and invited us with a grin, which I shall always remember, to a dish of mustard and crow's gizzards, a dish I was more than half afraid of tasting, lest it should change me to some bird of darkness, condemned to mope eternally on the black rafters of the cottage.

Those who live on the top floor will shout that the rafters are rotten and the roof falling; that it is impossible to live, there any longer, and that it is immediately necessary, first of all, to put up new beams and to repair the roof. And from their point of view they will be perfectly right. Certainly it is not possible to live any longer on that floor.

It might seem as if it had to do with some machinery, except that it is unlike the sound of any machine that you ever heard. It begins in the room where you are sitting reading, or else out in the verandah, where you are enjoying the cooler breeze of evening. Loud as it is, you cannot locate it. At one moment you think it is up aloft amongst the rafters, at another moment it seems to be close by.

Each raft was composed of heavy timbers, bound together in bunches of three, the spaces between being connected by ships' masts and lighter spar-work, and with a tooth-like projection along the whole outer edge, formed of strong rafters, pointed and armed with sharp prongs and hooks of iron. Thus a serried phalanx, as it were, of spears stood ever on guard to protect the precious inner structure.

The deserted wooden corridor, with beams, rafters, and floors whitened by the sun and wind, contained a few withered leaves, dryly rotting skins, and thongs of leather, as if undisturbed by human care. But among these scattered débris of former life and habitation there was no noisome or unclean suggestion of decay. A faint spiced odor of desiccation filled the bare walls.

If he could have heard a conversation then going on in Old Man Curry's tackle-room, the figuring would have been easier. "Frank," said the old man, "I had my eye on you to-day. You ain't got designs on that fool's bank roll, have you?" The Bald-faced Kid blew a cloud of cigarette smoke into the air and watched it float to the rafters before he answered question with question.

Von Bloom cast his eyes up to the roof a sloping structure with long eaves. It consisted of heavy beams of dry wood with rafters and laths, and all covered over with a thatch of rushes, a foot in thickness. It would make a tremendous blaze, and the smoke would be likely enough to suffocate the lion even before the blaze could get at him. The suggestion of Hendrik was adopted.

The shutter bars the outer world from the school-house. Thrums is the name I give here to the handful of houses jumbled together in a cup, which is the town nearest the school-house. Until twenty years ago its every other room, earthen-floored and showing the rafters overhead, had a hand-loom, and hundreds of weavers lived and died Thoreaus "ben the hoose" without knowing it.

There was a merry bustling pause while the glasses were filled; then rising to their feet as with one man, all the gentlemen stood with brimming goblets one instant extended, the next emptied to the last drop; and then the cheers rang out, swelling up the rafters, three times three, seeming to carry my soul along with them.

The rafters here were heavy with their wealth of hams, brown-skinned flitches of bacon interspersed with the white tight-corded home-cured "Barbie's Best," as Wilson christened it. All along the back, in glass cases to keep them unsullied, were bales of cloth, layer on layer to the roof.