United States or Marshall Islands ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
At sunset on the third day we emerged from the palm forest and endless marshes, and by the evening of the fourth day the church, built of palm logs, loomed up on the horizon. Many of the Indians came out to meet us, and my arrival was the talk of the village. The people seemed happy, and the missionaries made me at home in their roughly-built log shanties.
Round this stood a colony of roughly-built huts, of mud, turf, or large blocks of the slate. Many workmen were engaged in splitting up the slates, or loading wagons with them, rude wild-looking men, at the sight of whom the ladies shrank up to their protectors, but who seemed too busy even to spare time for staring at them.
I had ridden all day through an endless vista ot ghostly grey gums and ironbarks, when I came in sight of the long wavering line of vivid green foliage which showed me that I had reached my destination a roughly-built slab hut with a roof of corrugated iron.
"I'd like to be behind him for a week, and I'd make him step a little faster. We have arrived at last, thank goodness." There was a small grass clearing in the midst of the woods. Chips and bits of wood were littered about, and across the clearing was a roughly-built house of unpainted boards. The front door was propped open by a stick.
The steep paths and flights of roughly-built steps that wind above and below the cottages are the only means of getting about in Runswick. The butcher's cart every Saturday penetrates into the centre of the village by the rough track which is all that is left of the good firm road from Hinderwell after it has climbed down the cliff.
The Smithsons rode away vaguely in search of a camping-ground; while we, having found out where our hut was, turned back and climbed a knoll behind the bazaar, and found ourselves in front of our future home, a very plain and roughly-built rectangular wooden hut, containing a small square room opening upon a verandah, and having a bedroom and bathroom on each side.
"All right, Jupe, we'll be right over," said Jack, "just as soon as we've got some of this grease off our hands." The boys' workshop was equipped with a washbasin and they soon made themselves presentable. Then they hurried to Mr. Chadwick's workshop. They found him standing before a roughly-built table on which were ranged some odd-looking bits of apparatus.
In a little roughly-built lumberman's hotel they ate breakfast in a room overlooking the river. The proprietor of the hotel, a large red-faced woman in a clean calico dress, was expecting them and, having served the breakfast, went out of the room grinning good naturedly and closing the door behind her.
Then we knew that the junks were off, for there came to us that peculiar flapping, rattling sound made by the waves against a vessel's planks, and this was particularly loud in the case of a roughly-built Chinese junk. "Are you going to follow them at once?" I said in a whisper. "Yes, till within an hour of daylight," was the reply. "Now, be silent."
Here and there old trees had been felled the autumn before; or a squatter's roughly-built and decaying cottage had disappeared. Margaret missed them each and all, and grieved over them like old friends. They came past the spot where she and Mr. Lennox had sketched.
Word Of The Day