“Yes,” said Uncle John, “so it had; and though the village of the Lake People was built many hundreds of years before ever there was a house like mine in all the country, yet the notion was the same. In the old days men felt safer with deep water all round them, than when there was only a stockade, or even a wall. The villages by the lakes in Switzerland that I told you of before, were built in that way over the water on piles.” David wanted to know how the Lake People had managed to support the platform on which the huts were built--was it held up by straight piles, like a table with a lot of legs? “No,” said Uncle John, “not in Dobran’s village, anyway. I will tell you what I know about it. Some time ago a farmer who lives near here had a boggy place on his farm. It lay in a hollow among his fields, and in winter or after a great deal of rain it became almost a lake. People used to say that once upon a time there had been a lake there, but it had got filled up with moss and peat. However, the farmer wanted to turn it into ploughing-land, so he set to work to drain it; his men dug drains and ran off all the water, and then they saw a large, low mound standing up out of the mud. And when they came to clear the mound away, they found that it was the remains of an ancient lake village that had lain hidden in the bog under the water for hundreds of years. I heard about it, so I went, and stayed all the time, day after day, while they were digging out the remains; and so I got a good notion of how those old people, that we have been reading about, used to make their lake-villages in this part of the country--for in other places they had other ways.” “What did you find?” the boys all asked. “Well, we didn’t find any huts; they had all gone to decay long before; but the great platform of tree-trunks was there, and its foundations and parts of what had been the gangway to the shore. And we found the old rubbish-heap, and we picked over and sifted every bit of it; and I will show you an arrow-head and some beads, and some pieces of pottery, that I picked out of the rubbish myself. In this rubbish were great numbers of bones of animals that the people had used for food. The bones were of deer and cattle and sheep and some of smaller animals, and some of birds. But the greatest find of all was a canoe. We found it lying buried in the mud, wonderfully preserved. We could see that it had been made, like Robinson Crusoe’s boat, out of the trunk of a tree, and hollowed out by fire, and hewn with stone axes.