The huts these faithful creatures lived in were chiefly composed of bamboo, timber, and leaves. Sometimes they caught fire. That did not trouble the savages much, and certainly did not keep them awake at night. For, had the whole village been burned down, they could have built another in a surprisingly short time.
When our hero and heroine got lost in the great primeval forest, Burnley Hall was in the most perfect and beautiful order, and its walks, its flower-garden, and shrubberies were a most pleasing sight. All was under the superintendence of a Scotch gardener, whom St. Clair had imported for the purpose.
By this time, too, a very large portion of the adjoining forest had been cut down, and the land on which those lofty trees had grown was under cultivation.
If the country which St. Clair had made his home was not in reality a land flowing with milk and honey, it yielded many commodities equally valuable. Every now and then--especially when the river was more or less in flood--immense rafts were sent down stream to distant Pará, where the valuable timber found ready market.
Several white men in boats always went in charge of these, and the boats served to assist in steering, and towing as well.
These rafts used often to be built close to the river before an expected rising of the stream, which, when it did come, floated them off and away.
But timber was not the only commodity that St. Clair sent down from his great estate. There were splendid quinine-trees. There was coca and cocoa, too.
There was a sugar plantation which yielded the best results, to say nothing of coffee and tobacco, Brazil-nuts and many other kinds of nuts, and last, but not least, there was gold.
This latter was invariably sent in charge of a reliable white man, and St. Clair lived in hope that he would yet manage to position a really paying gold-mine.
More than once St. Clair had permitted Roland and Peggy to journey down to Pará on a great raft. But only at the season when no storms blew. They had an old Indian servant to cook and "do" for them, and the centre of the raft was hollowed out into a kind of cabin roofed over with bamboo and leaves. Steps led up from this on to a railed platform, which was called the deck.