Urged by his desire to obtain boards, Sammy at length entered the door, and, standing in the passage, looked in. "I see some square pieces of timber, Archie, that would be nice to make the frame of the bench; but I don't see any boards. The partition's all taken down: only these timbers what it was fastened to are left." A slight noise was heard in the room; and Sam tumbled over Archie in his haste to escape, and both ran away. They ventured back, and found that the noise that had alarmed them was made by the fluttering of a piece of loose bark (moved by the wind) which hung by one end to a log; and found there was one short board left in the room, about six feet long. They thought there might be some in the chamber where the children used to sleep, which was not so dark as the rest of the house, because light came through many chinks in the roof. Sam mounted the ladder to look; but, just as he got his head above the level of the floor, he heard a great scrambling, and something went swiftly past him. He either leaped or tumbled to the floor (he never knew which); and they ran home, resolving never again to go to that place in the twilight. Early next morning they went there; and it seemed very different in the daytime. They brought their guns with them; but of what use they supposed fire-arms would be, in a contest with supernatural foes, is not readily perceived: however, they felt stronger for having them. Archie opened the shutters, that had been closed by the hands of Mrs. McDonald a few moments before her death, and the sunlight streamed in. In the chamber they found a wide board twenty feet long, that was planed on one side, and placed between the beds for the children to step on when they got out of bed, as the rest of the floor was laid with poles that were rough with knots and bark. They took down the joist in the room below: these had been sawed out with the whip-saw, by Mr. Seth and his brother, when they put up the partition. They were a great acquisition to the boys, almost as much as the boards; for they could not have hewn out joist accurately enough to frame together. "Mr. McDonald didn't think, when he got Uncle Seth to make this partition, a meal-chest, and milk-shelves (what nobody else in the Run has got, and Mr. Blanchard himself ain't got), that they would take the boards to make coffins for himself and his folks; did he, Sammy?" "Don't let's talk about that here." They yoked the oxen, hauled their stuff to the Cuthbert house, and set about making a bench. "How high and wide and long shall we make it?" said Archie. "Uncle Seth told me it ought to be about as big as this table." Cutting their joist, they halved the pieces together, and made the frame of the bench with a cross-sill at the bottom in the centre to receive the end of the spindle. How they should make the spindle, and what they should make it of, was the next thing to be considered.