red since the creation. I
then thought I had the worst part of my job to get over; however, I went
on, and having contrived, in most of my upright side-quarters, to take
the tops of trees, and leave on the lower parts their cleft, where they
began to branch out and divide from the main stem, I set one of them
upright against the rock, then laid one end of my long ceiling-pieces
upon the cleft of it, and laid the other end upon a tree on the same
side, whose top I had also sawed off with a proper cleft I then went and
did the same on the other side; after this I laid on a proper number of
cross-beams, and tied all very firmly together with the bark of young
trees stripped off in long thongs, which answered that purpose very
well. Thus I proceeded, crossing, joining, and fastening all together,
till the whole roof was so strong and firm that there was no stirring
any part of it I then spread it over with small lop wood, on which I
raised a ridge of dried grass and weeds, very thick, and thatched over
the whole with the leaves of a tree very much resembling those of a
palm, but much thicker, and not quite so broad; the entire surface, I
might say, was as smooth as a die, and so ordered, by a gentle declivity
every way, as to carry off the wet.

Having covered in my building, I was next to finish and close the
walls of it; the skeleton of these was composed of sticks, crossing one
another checker-wise and tied together; to fill up the voids, I wove
upon them the longest and most pliable twigs of the underwood I could
find, leaving only a doorway on one side, between two stems of a tree
which, dividing in the trunk at about two feet from the ground, grew
from thence, for the rest of its height, as if the branches were a
couple of trees a little distance from one another, which made a sort of
stile-way to my room. When this was all done, I tempered up some earth
by the lake-side, and mixing it to a due consistence with mud, which I
took from the lake, applied it as a plastering in this manner: I divided
it into pieces, which I rolled up of the size of a foot-ball; these
lumps I stuck close by one another on the lattice, pressing them very
hard with my hands, which forced part of them quite through the small
twigs, and then I smoothed both sides with the back of my saw, to about
the thickness of five or six inches; so that by this means I had a wall
round my new apartment a foot thick. This plaster-work cost me some time
and a