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Updated: May 8, 2025
On one side a respectable lean-to had been constructed by nailing a plank to two fir-trees, running sloping poles thence to the ground, and thatching the whole with spruce branches and heather. On the other side two small dilapidated home-made tents were pitched. Dougal motioned his companion into the lean-to, where they had some privacy from the rest of the band. "Well, what's your news?"
As it was, his legs felt as if they were hanging paralysed downward, and he was conscious of the fact that the batten that he had last grasped was slowly gliding through his right hand and getting thinner and thinner, till it passed rustling away right in amongst the palm-leaf thatching. "Oh dear!" sighed Peter Pegg, "could that have been fancy? It felt just like a big snake. Phew! How hot it is!
"I'll tell you, madam: in the first place, you have the wood to build the house with; then you have the bark with which you can make ropes and lines, and fishing-nets if you please; then you have the leaves for thatching your house; then you have the fruit, which, as a nut, is good to eat, and very useful in cooking; and in the young nut is the milk, which is also very wholesome; then you have the oil to burn, and the shell to make cups of, if you haven't any, and then you can draw toddy from the tree, which is very pleasant to drink when fresh, but will make you tipsy if it is kept too long.
Farmer White's laborers were often complaining that things were so dear that they could not buy a bit of meat. He knew it was partly true, but not entirely; for it was before these very hard times that their complaints began. One morning he stepped out to see how an outhouse which he was thatching went on. He was surprised to find the work at a stand. He walked over to the thatcher's house.
By this hurried contrivance Bathsheba's property in wheat was safe for at any rate a week or two, provided always that there was not much wind. Next came the barley. This it was only possible to protect by systematic thatching. Time went on, and the moon vanished not to reappear. It was the farewell of the ambassador previous to war.
He "reckoned" that each thatching would last at least twenty years, and being well stricken in years, or "getting-up-along" as they say in Hampshire, he would add gloomily, "I shall never do it no more." He was a true prophet, for on every building he thatched for me the work outlived him, and even after the lapse of thirty years is not completely worn out.
Oak went to the recumbent form of Matthew Moon, who usually undertook the rough thatching of the home-stead, and shook him. The shaking was without effect. Gabriel shouted in his ear, "where's your thatching-beetle and rick-stick and spars?" "Under the staddles," said Moon, mechanically, with the unconscious promptness of a medium.
In ten minutes every wind of heaven seemed to be roaming at large. Some of the thatching on the wheat-stacks was now whirled fantas- tically aloft, and had to be replaced and weighted with some rails that lay near at hand. This done, Oak slaved away again at the barley.
The walls of the "god-house" were heavy and substantial, smoothly daubed with mud, neatly plastered and often adorned with colored decorations. The "cook-house," slighter and less well-built, was made of poles daubed with mud, and rough with heavy thatching. The granary was elevated above the ground, and sheltered with its own neat thatching.
D'you remember the time she came prancing into church with a bustle stuck on behind, and everyone staring and fidgeting so as pore Mus' Pratt lost his place in the Prayers and jumped all the way from the Belief to the Royal Family?" "And that time as she hit Job Piper over the head wud a bunch of osiers just because he'd told her he knew more about thatching than she did."
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