On the next morning Tig rose early, and found that Dobran’s people were already astir. Eira and another girl were grinding corn on a big, flat rubbing stone; and afterwards Eira took the meal that they had ground to make cakes for breakfast.
Then, after they had eaten the morning meal, Tig bade farewell to his friends, the Lake People, and set off homeward. Some of the men paddled him ashore in a canoe, and guided him through the woods and set him on the way; and he returned to his father’s camp.
Chapter the Twenty-fifth
DICK AND HIS FRIENDS: A Talk about Ancient Lake-Dwellings
WHEN Uncle John had finished reading, he asked the boys if they had ever heard before of people living in houses with water all round as a defence against their enemies?
“Yes, if you mean a single house,” Dick said, “you told me that your house here once had a moat all round it.”
“Yes,” said Uncle John, “so it had; and though the village of the Lake People was built many hundreds of years before ever there was a house like mine in all the country, yet the notion was the same. In the old days men felt safer with deep water all round them, than when there was only a stockade, or even a wall. The villages by the lakes in Switzerland that I told you of before, were built in that way over the water on piles.”