"Quite so," said M. Zermatt. "We shall deserve the thanks of all future colonists when once we have completed this canal."
"But not of the old ones, who were satisfied with what nature had given them!" Jack remarked. "Poor old Jackal River! They are going to tire it out turning a wheel; they are going to take a bit of it away; and all for the material advantage of people we do not even know!"
"It is plain that Jack is not an advocate of colonisation," said Mrs. Wolston.
"Our two families settled in this district, and their existence assured—what more could we wish for, Mrs. Wolston?"
"Good!" said Hannah Wolston. "But Jack will change his ideas with all the improvements you are going to introduce."
"Do you think so?" Jack answered with a laugh.
"When shall you begin this great undertaking?" Betsy enquired.
"In a few days, dear," M. Zermatt assured her. "After we have got in our first harvest we shall have three months' leisure before the second."
This being settled, a most laborious task ensued, lasting for five weeks from the 15th of November to the 20th of December.
Expeditions had to be made to Prospect Hill for the purpose of felling several hundred sago-trees in the adjacent woods. There was no difficulty in hollowing them out, and their pith was carefully collected in bamboo barrels. It was the hauling of the trees that constituted the really hardest part of the work. This devolved upon M. Zermatt and Jack, assisted by the two buffaloes, the onager, and the young ass, which drew a kind of trolley or truck, like those used later in Europe. It was Ernest who hit upon the idea of suspending these heavy lengths of timber to the axle-tree of the two wheels of the waggon, previously detached from the body for that purpose. If the tree-trunks did scrape along the ground, they only did so at one end, and their hauling was effected under much easier conditions.