Before the end of the autumn Britomarte’s house was completed. A rough house it was, indeed; not at all like those of the north temperate zone, yet possessed of some advantages peculiar to itself. Its architect was limited in the matter of hand tools and of building materials; for the first he had to depend upon the carpenter’s box rescued from the wreck, and for the second upon the cocoa-palm trees and the mountain rocks. Its site was selected in front of the cocoa-palm grove, facing the sea, and looking westward toward their native hemisphere. Its plan was simple enough, and had first been drawn by Justin upon paper. It was a low, square, spacious house, all of one story, to keep it safe from destruction by the tornadoes that sometimes visited the island. It contained four large rooms, separated by two long passages that ran, one from front to back and the other from end to end, crossing each other at right angles in the centre of the house, so that each room was completely divided from the others. It had four doors, one at each extremity of the two passages. The rooms had each two windows in the outer walls, and two doors opening into the passages. The walls were built of the long, straight, smooth trunks of the cocoa-palm tree, which, in the absence of a sawmill, formed the very best substitutes for planks. The roof was made of transverse poles cut from the trunks of very young trees and covered with the broad, strong, feathery palm leaves, laid one over another in rows, and kept down by other transverse poles securely fastened. This rustic roof afforded a complete protection against the rain and the wind. The kitchen chimney was built of fragments of rock joined with a strong cement made by mixing the sap of the cocoa tree with lime burned by Justin from the shells and bones collected from the island. There were no floors, except the ground, which was leveled and beaten hard. The walls inside were made smooth by a rude plastering of moistened soil packed in between the logs. And then both floor and walls were covered with the cement, that gave them the appearance of cream-colored stone. I said the house fronted west. The windows of the two front rooms only were glazed with glass, taken from the sashes in the cabin of the wreck. They had also shutters. The two back rooms had shutters only. The northwestern front room was the family parlor. It was neatly fitted up with the furniture rescued from the saloon of the wreck. It had a red carpet on the floor, a centre table and a lamp, a side table and bookshelves, a sofa, a rocking-chair and four common chairs, and lighter articles too numerous and trivial to mention.