Dobran’s wife, who was sitting beside her husband, was busily spinning yarn; and when Dobran had finished speaking, she began to hum a song as she drew the thread. She had a big bunch of wool fastened to the end of a stick beside her, and she drew out some hair from the wool and twisted it into a thread between her thumb and finger. Then she tied the end of this to the spindle, which was a pointed stick loaded about the middle with a ball of dried clay, and started twirling it round with her other hand. As the spindle went spinning round in the air, and dropping towards the ground, it drew the thread out longer, twisting it all the time. As soon as the spindle reached the ground, Dobran’s wife picked it up, wound the thread round it and set it spinning again; and so she went on until she had spun a good ball of yarn. Outside the hut a daughter of Dobran’s, whose name was Eira, was sitting at the loom weaving cloth. Her loom was an upright wooden frame, and the main threads, called the warp, were stretched from the top of the loom to the bottom and kept taut by means of stone weights. In her hand Eira held a shuttle containing the cross-thread, called the woof, which she passed in and out through the warp, from side to side of the loom. After she had worked in five or six cross-lines in this way, and so had got a narrow piece of cloth woven, she stopped and picked up a thin, flat piece of wood, cut into teeth like a comb, and combed the web and pressed it down firmly. Her thread was finer and her cloth better than the women made in Tig’s village, and he stood and watched her. “Aye,” said Dobran, “she is a famous weaver. She shall give thee a girdle of her own weaving. Nay, now, she shall weave thee a shirt of three colours, and thou shalt come again and fetch it for thyself.” [Illustration: Weaving at the Loom] 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. [Illustration] _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.”