“When those people had a feast,” said David, “what did they drink? Only water?”
“I don’t know,” said Uncle John. “But I should think they drank some kind of beer or spirit—not very strong, perhaps, because drink has to be well brewed and kept long if it is to be made strong. They may have made beer out of corn or even out of heather-tips, or perhaps they used honey and made mead: we do not know. The only thing we can say is that there are hardly any people in the world who do not make a drink of some kind from grain or from some part of a plant; and therefore these old people of ours most likely did the same.
“If Dick will reach me Stevenson’s Poems from the second shelf there, I will read you one called Heather Ale, which will make a good ending to all this dry talk about dew-ponds.”
Chapter the Nineteenth
THE STORY OF TIG: How Gofa made Pottery
IT has been said before that Gofa did all the work of her own household, not only cooking the food, but also making the clothes, and preparing the skins out of which the clothes were made. Also she made the baskets for storing and carrying the food in, and the pottery, too; and when her stock of household pots had become low, she used to set to work to make a fresh lot. And this was how she did it. She went down into the valley to a place by the river where there was good clay. She took with her a large basket and a rough-and-ready trowel made out of the shoulder-blade of a deer. She dug out the clay, enough to fill the basket, and carried it home on her shoulders.
When Gofa was ready to make pottery, she first prepared the clay by mixing it with coarse sand, which also she had brought from the river-side. She moistened the clay with water when she added the sand, and kneaded it thoroughly with her hands, just as if she were making dough. She was always careful to mix the sand and the clay in the right proportions; for clay without sand, or with too little, was apt to crack when it came to be baked, and with too much it was not stiff enough to mould well into shape. She always saved the bits of any pots that were broken, and having pounded them up until they were quite small, she mixed them up with the new stuff. By long practice Gofa knew just how to prepare the clay for use.
Having got the clay ready, Gofa took a lump of it in her hands and laid it on a stone slab which served her as a working bench. Then, with her fingers and a smooth stone, and a stick shaped into a kind of blade, she worked up the clay into a little bowl, building up the sides against the stick, and smoothing the inside with her pebble. But for the larger jars and pipkins she had another way. She took a round basket shaped like a basin and set it before her. Then she took a piece of clay and rolled it with the flat of her hand on the bench until she had made it like a very long, thin, clay sausage. Then she picked this up and began to coil it round from the bottom of the basket, inside, pinching and pressing it with her fingers and the pebble until it was flat and smooth. Then she rolled out another piece and coiled this round as before, gradually building up the sides of the pot and pinching the coils together as she went on. At length, by adding coil to coil, she raised the sides and neck of the pipkin, which she then smoothed and finished off outside with the wooden tool.