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It is durable and if lost can be readily replaced from the forest by good men with axes and adzes. But, because of its great weight and low free-board, it is unsuitable as a freight carrier and by reason of the limitations of its construction is not of the correct form to successfully run the rapid and bad waters of many of the South American rivers.

Then the carpenters landed, who had great axes in their hands, and planes and adzes hung at their sides. They took counsel together, and sought for a good spot to place a castle on.

Besides all the various celts, hatchets, and adzes, whose name is legion, and whose patterns are manifold, many other tools or implements occur abundantly in the barrows or caches.

No Homeric cairn with Homeric contents has ever been discovered; and if we did find examples of Homeric cairns, it appears, from the poems, that they would very seldom contain the arms of the dead. Nowhere, again, do we find graves containing bronze swords and iron axes and adzes.

Weston smiled down at Rebecca's serious face. "So 'tis not spices from far Arabia, or strings of pink coral, this morning," he continued, taking the basket, "but pine chips. Well, come over here and we will soon fill the basket," and he led the way to where two men were at work with sharp adzes smoothing down a big stick of timber.

Still, by dint of sawing and chopping, they got a dozen ribs cut out and fixed in their places. They improved too, and, Gerald declared, "would have got on like a house on fire," had not one of the adzes been totally disabled by the constant grinding which it required to restore the edge.

A pair of carpenter's pincers served for tongs, and charcoal, made from the cocoanut and other trees, did duty for coals. In order to obtain planks, the missionary split trees in half with wedges and then the natives thinned them down with adzes extemporised by fitting crooked handles to ordinary hatchets.

Sitting before the inn door, on drowsy June afternoons, Duff Salter heard the adzes ring and hammers smite the thousand bolt-heads on lofty vessels, raised on mast-like scaffolds as if they meant to be launched into the air and go cleared for yonder faintly tinted spectral moon, which lingered so long by day, like the symbol of the Indian race, departed but lambent in thoughtful memories.

Taboo poi bowls and finger bowls, left-handed adzes of the canoe gods, lava-cup lamps, stone mortars and pestles and poi-pounders. And adzes again, a myriad of them, beautiful ones, from an ounce in weight for the finer carving of idols to fifteen pounds for the felling of trees, and all with the sweetest handles I have ever beheld.

A boat could not cross it, especially at the approach of the bad season. Pencroft had expressly declared this. Now, to construct a simple boat even with the necessary tools, was a difficult work, and the colonists not having tools they must begin by making hammers, axes, adzes, saws, augers, planes, etc., which would take some time.