Maid of the Mist

by John Oxenham

"I've been thinking of that. I will run four boards up through a hole in the roof, and we must try to induce the smoke to go up. There is no clay here, you see, nor stone,—nothing but sand."

The site settled, he set to work at once rafting his timber across the lake from the spit, and then hauling it across the sandy plain past the fresh-water pools, and this gave him a full week's hard labour. Some of the lighter planks he let The Girl drag across, since she insisted on having at all events one hand in the work. The heavier ones were as much as he could handle himself. In his rest times, and after supper of a night, he whittled pegs till he had an ample supply, and sharpened his axes with the bit of hone he had found in the carpenter's chest.

With his axe he hacked out a rude spade from a plank, and trimmed the handle and the point with his knife; and then he set to work on his three sandhills, cutting down the side of each where it rounded down into the cup-like hollow, and flinging the sand into the cup itself to make a level floor.

The building of such a house was entirely new to him, but he had brains and he bent them all to every problem that presented itself, and never failed to find the way out. For instance,—the space he wished his house to occupy between the sandhills was quite twelve feet in width, and his planks ran mostly to six or eight feet only. There must therefore be a row of posts in the middle, with one or more beams on top as a ridge-pole, from which he could carry side pieces to the walls six feet away on either side, and he had foreseen some difficulty in fixing these posts absolutely rigid in the yielding sand. If they wobbled or gave in any direction his roof would be in danger.

But before he began carving down his sand-slopes he had settled that point. He selected his uprights, the longest and strongest in his stock, chopped them to size, and to the end of each pegged stout flat cross-pieces, boring the holes with his auger and driving home the pegs with the back of his axe. These he set up in a line in the middle of the hollow, standing upright on their cross-piece feet. Then, as he carved down his slope, every spadeful of sand buried the cross-pieces deeper, till, when he had finished, they were under two feet of well-trampled sand and he looked upon their rigidity as a personal triumph.

That was surely as extraordinary a house as was ever built by a man who knew nothing whatever about building. It took him five full weeks and he enjoyed every minute of it. And so did The Girl, for she sat in the sun, watching all his cheerful activities with envious eyes because she was so unable to share them, discussing points with him as they arose, giving suggestions and advice which he always adopted when they chimed with his own, and approving heartily of all he did.

"I wish I could help,"—how many times she said it, and thought it very many more. "It is disgusting to have to sit and watch while you work like a—like a galley-slave."

"Galley-slaves don't build houses—not such houses as this anyway. There never was such a house before," he laughed. "Besides, you help more than you know by simply sitting there and approving of it. 'They also serve,' you know, 'who only sit and watch.'"

"Who says that?"

"One John Milton,—not quite in those words, but the meaning is the same. As a matter of fact, he had, I believe, just gone blind when he said it and was feeling rather out of it. Your arm will soon be all right again. It's doing famously."