Fig. 22.—Ceiling-Board Weighted with Stones.
Fig. 23.—Ceiling-Board in Closet.
We have been thus explicit in describing the ceiling, because so few even among the Japanese seem to understand precisely the manner in which it is suspended.
In long rooms one is oftentimes surprised to see boards of great width composing the ceiling, and apparently continuous from one end of the room to the other. What appears to be a [pg 31] single board is in fact composed of a number of short lengths. The matching of the grain and color is accomplished by taking two adjacent boards in a bundle of boards, as previously figured and described, and placing them so that the same ends come together ([fig. 24]),—care being taken, of course, to have the joints come directly over the cross-pieces. The graining of the wood becomes continuous, each line of the grain and the color being of course duplicated and matched in the other board. Sometimes a number of lengths of board may be continued in this way, and yet from below the appearance is that of a single long piece.
Fig. 24.—Method of Removing Boards from a Bundle to Preserve Uniformity of Grain.
The advantage of keeping all the boards of a given log in juxtaposition will be readily understood. In our country a carpenter has to ransack a lumber-yard to find wood of a similar grain and color; and even then he generally fails to get wood of precisely the same kind.