Siding

“ When the frame is finished, the question of siding must be taken up. If the original purpose of the building is to be carried out, poultry experts claim that a double wall is very desirable as a barrier against dampness, which arises primarily from the exhalations of the birds. If the walls are cold, this dampness will condense on them, while with a double wall this does not take place, as the dampness escapes with the air. The outside casing may be of ship-lap boards or tongued and grooved material. For [446] a cabin or shop, novelty siding, clapboards or even shingles may be used. ”

“ The report told of the failure of men to cope successfully with the Big Muddy. The river maps, on a scale of an inch-to-the-mile, showed the twists and bends of the river, the islands and reaches.
Besides river reports, Sibley had read histories and stories, trappers’ magazines, biographies, grammars, and what not, when he must sit in the little cabin of the shanty-boat floating in a still sheltered eddy, with the rain pattering on the canvas-covering of the thin board roof. ”

“ To my delight, on this particular occasion, the cistern was in excellent form, honking, whistling and booming like a railway terminus. I gave the noise five minutes' start, and when I calculated that the sleepers would have finished cursing me and put their heads under the clothes to shut out the din, I reduced the flow of water to a small stream and left the bathroom, taking good care to leave the light burning and lock the door after me. Then I picked up my pauper and carried him upstairs as lightly as possible. ”

“ Up stream was his own house; down stream, less than half a mile, a low red farm-house squatted in an old orchard, beside what looked like small lock-gates on the Thames. There was no doubt as to ownership. Mr. Sidney saw him while yet far off, and bellowed at him about pig-pounds and flood-gates. These last were two great sliding shutters of weedy oak across the brook, which were prised up inch by inch with a crowbar along a notched strip of iron, and when Sidney opened them they at once let out half the water. Midmore watched it shrink between its aldered banks like some conjuring trick. ”

“ Silt accumulates in docks where the lowering of the water-level by locking, the drawing down of half-tide basins, and the raising of the water at spring tides, involve the admission of considerable volumes of tidal water heavily charged with silt, which is deposited in still water and has to be periodically Maintenance of depth.removed by dredging. ”

“ When ensconced in some sunny and sheltered hollow with some just melted pool at its bottom, as you recline on the fine withered sedge in which the. mice have had their galleries, leaving it pierced with countless holes, and are, perchance, dreaming of spring there, a single dry, hard croak, like a grating twig, comes up from the pool. Where there is a small, smooth surface of melted ice bathing the bare button bushes, or water andromeda, or tufts of sedge, such is the earliest voice of the liquid pools, hard and dry and grating. ”

“ It very seldom happens that anyone falls overboard; and even if a person does fall into the water it matters but little, for there is no Siamese who cannot swim. When the children are ever so tiny, their mothers fasten under their arms a big tin float. Then they throw the babies—for they are nothing more—into the warm waters of the canal or river, where they bob up and down like so many animated bits of brown cork upon the surface of the stream.
There are, of course, many people who, in the capital especially, live upon land, and of their houses we shall say something in a later chapter. ”

“ For a woman to carry water in a sieve the weather must be dry, for in damp weather the water would run through the meshes, even if the threads or wires were just oily enough and not too oily, even if the meshes were just the right size to favor the forming in each mesh of a little pocket of water underneath, like the edges of the upstanding drop of wine on a sofa-cushion. ”

“ The relative position in the silt, from which the canoes were exhumed, could help us little in any attempt to ascertain their relative ages, unless they had been found vertically above each other. The varying depths of an estuary, its banks of silt and sand, the set of its currents, and the influence of its tides in scouring out alluvium from some parts of its bottom and redepositing it in others, are circumstances which require to be taken into account in all such calculations. ”

“ In other regions the flow of the tide is tempestuous, but in that land of eternal good weather waves touch the sand shore with gentleness; the ocean does not strike land with an outburst. Such silence surrounded me that a quarter of a mile from the shore line I could have heard the conversation of men. ”

“ The first beginnings of dawn were in the Eastern sky when the party, their torch flung aside, came to the point where the water way was no longer under the gardens but ran, as an open, deep cut, to the mighty cistern which distributed the water from the mountain reservoirs. ”

“ I proceed upon the time-honored experience of physicians that certain malarious diseases prevail most actively in damp spots in houses and villages situated in hollow places or at the foot of slopes, after inundations. A sink is an artificial trough, an artificial flood-region for each house, into which is concentrated the drainage from the roof and from the surrounding ground. ”

“ When we live in a sieve and a crockery-jar!
And all night long, in the moonlight pale,
We sail away with a pea-green sail
In the shade of the mountains brown." Far and few, far and few, Are the lands where the Jumblies live: Their heads are green, and their hands are blue; And they went to sea in a sieve. ”

“ Some deposit of silt generally occurs. The construction of an embankment reduces the area of the flood water, and thus generally reduces the silting and leaves more silt in the river proper. The depth and velocity in the river are increased. Everything depends on which is increased most. Most likely the stream is of shallow section and the velocity is increased most (Chap. IV., Art. 6, par. 6) , and the increased silt-supporting power may make up for the increased charge of silt. ”

“ The waterman, standing at the head of the cradle with a ladle of any kind, keeps baling water continuously into it. A third man washes carefully into a large tin dish the deposit that has fallen through the sieves of the cradle on to the boards beneath, carries it into the stream, where he stands knee-deep, and, tilting the dish up under the water, and shaking its contents, the precious metal falls to the bottom, while the earth and sand are washed out by the water. ”

“ When she fights strong and the tiller slips a little, in a jerky, greasy sort of way, let up on her a trifle; it is the way she tells you at night that the water is too shoal; but keep edging her up, little by little, toward the point. You are well up on the bar, now; there is a bar under every point, because the water that comes down around it forms an eddy and allows the sediment to sink. ”

“ The cold breezes, which render so bare of interest the walks round the great majority of our seaside towns, pass harmlessly over the valley of the Sid, where the vegetation is as bright and luxuriant as if the ocean lay leagues away, instead of breaking on the shore within a few feet of the front line of houses. ”

“ They said, they knew it, but it would not hurt them, and desired us to eat it, for it was good, and made men strong. There appeared no symptoms of jealousy among them. The harbour of Sibt is of a semi-circular form, screened between N. N. E. and S. S. W. but to the south, and south west, it is exposed, and therefore is good only in summer. The 16th, at five in the morning, we sailed from the port of Sibt, but, the wind being contrary, were obliged to steer to the W. S. W. and it was not till nine o'clock we could resume our true course, which was south-east. ”

“ Sir Sidney, who had spoken French from a child with the fluency of a native, told the man that he had a particular reason for wishing to visit one of the English ships lying off the harbour, and that he would give a handsome reward to be conveyed aboard. The poor fisherman consented on condition that the stranger would wait till it was later, and meanwhile invited him to his cottage to take rest before starting. Sir Sidney accepted his offer, and followed him to a cottage, where a poor old woman, the fisherman's wife, spread a cloth and laid before them a good supper. ”

“ Hunters and fishermen by nature and training, they are skillful boatmen, and in those days they built wonderfully beautiful canoes of the red cedar, some of them large enough to carry sixty men at the paddles. Each spring more than a thousand men gathered together in Sitka Bay, coming from the different villages, to fish for herring at the spawning time, when those fish run in countless myriads in those waters. ”

“ The sky was clearing to the eastward, the light giving a droll shape to the bushes, and showing a little mist hanging low when the keel grated on the gravel, and there on the shore-head was a man standing, a sea-coat, as I think they name it, round him. ”

“ One, apparently in a spirit of daring, would set out to cross our path—leaving his little cove, he would glide with the utmost rapidity over the river in front of us, leaving a silver line on the smooth surface of the stream, and after we had passed, glide back, bobbing up and down upon the waves in our wake. ”

“ It was filled with mossy bowlders, just like those under his camp, and down in between them were cool, clear wells of running water.
Sid drank, and then started up the valley, searching the cliff walls for some of the swallow-nest houses of the cliff dwellers. Then, in a widening of the valley floor, something attracted him. Thick-grown with weeds were clumps of bladed grasses that looked somehow familiar. ”

“ He drove fish into the treacherous net with the help of the King, who, led into the water, muddied and stirred it so that not only those silvery leapers but all other creatures vanished as far as they could to an unmuddied depth. ”

“ It would be necessary to have a shed to work under, large enough to contain a boat, both for shelter from the rain and for shade from the pitiless tropical sun. The building of such a shed was therefore the first task. As a suitable shipyard I selected the side of the stream on the sands of the sea-beach, and far enough above tide to be safe from a possible storm. Here I put up eight posts in the sand. ”

“ Blake and I knew that the Sitwell winter camp was down on the Cruzados river, directly under the mesa, and all summer long, while we drifted about with our cattle from one water-hole to another, we planned how we were going to climb the mesa and be the first men up there. After supper, when we lit our pipes and watched the sunset, climbing the mesa was our staple topic of conversation. Our job was a cinch; the actual work wouldn’t have kept one man busy. The Sitwell people were good to their hands. ”

“ Of famous Sidon in Phœnicia reached—
[206] Long ruined now, with her twin city Tyre;
Then, paired with her as mistress of the main,
Sidon sat leaning on her promontory,
Diffused along its northward-sliding slopes,
Like a luxurious queen on her divan.
Her sailors drove her keels to every haven,
And fetched her home the spoil of every clime. ”

“ The water is drawn by lowering the earthen or brazen vessel, the drawer standing beside the well, or, to avoid the risk of striking the fragile chatty against its side, standing with one foot on the well-wall, and the other on a plank, laid across it for this purpose. Women may at all times be seen clustered about these wells, chatting, laughing, and gossipping, each with her water-jar and a cord suited to the depth of the well. ”

“ The water coming up with the tide is heavily charged with mud washed from the Humber banks, and this silt is deposited to the depth of some feet in places, and has always proved to be of the utmost fertility. ”

“ Slithered up Mount Ararat and climbed into the Ark,—
Slipping with his long dank hair; and sliding slyly in his barque,
Pushed it slowly in a wholly glassy creek until we feel
Pink crags tremble under us and wondrous clear waters run
Over Shem and Ham and Japhet, moving with their long sleek daughters,
Swift as fishes rainbow-coloured darting under morning waters....
Burning seraph beasts sing clearly to the young flamingo Sun. ”

“ The tide flows up the river many miles past the waterworks, carrying up with it the filth from the sewers. The supply of water was, to be sure, obtained when the tide was down, but as the banks of the river are clothed with sedges in many parts, and its bottom deep with mud, the water can never be free from sewage. ”

“ The tendency of the bed to silt will (Art. 6) be greater at the deeper section and, when silting has occurred on the bed, the section will be reduced and there will be a tendency to scour at the sides. Thus the cross-sections tend to become also uniform in shape. If a bank of silt has formed in a stream, the tendency is for scour to occur. There is also a tendency for silt to deposit just below the point where the bank ends. Hence a silt bank often moves downstream. ”

“ Sidon, the stage of the moving events so far recorded, though it makes much of possessing a separate importance, is really a cross-river residential suburb of Tyre, the great seaport in which all the ships of the world come to and fro. During the day Sidon is virtually emptied of its men-folk, and is given up to perambulators and feminine activities generally; for the men have streamed across the ferries that bridge the sunny, boisterous river, to the docks and offices of Tyre. ”

“ You are right, chief. It is our place to make due preparation against hunger and cold, for all the year roots, berries, and game cannot be then as easily obtained as now. The sun is at the meridian, and they will be alarmed at the cabin, if we do not return soon. But, we will be here in the morning again, and clear out some of this rubbish, so that we can take up our abode here as soon as Sidney can be moved, and then we will devote our time in preparing for every contingency in our power. ”