"We'll soon have it back to fourteen. You see, if I can carve out the sides of those three smaller hills, and back our house into each of them, it will make immensely for solidity and warmth. No gale can blow through a sand-hill, though they do waltz about now and again. But these seem fairly well set and fixed. I'll start on it tomorrow. I wish I had a spade and a saw. I can chop out some kind of a spade from a plank, maybe, but, lacking a saw, the house will be a bit rough, I'm afraid." "That doesn't matter as long as it stands up and keeps us warm." "Oh, I'll guarantee it will stand up and keep you warm." "Can you make a chimney?" "I've been thinking of that. I will run four boards up through a hole in the roof, and we must try to induce the smoke to go up. There is no clay here, you see, nor stone,--nothing but sand." The site settled, he set to work at once rafting his timber across the lake from the spit, and then hauling it across the sandy plain past the fresh-water pools, and this gave him a full week's hard labour. Some of the lighter planks he let The Girl drag across, since she insisted on having at all events one hand in the work. The heavier ones were as much as he could handle himself. In his rest times, and after supper of a night, he whittled pegs till he had an ample supply, and sharpened his axes with the bit of hone he had found in the carpenter's chest. With his axe he hacked out a rude spade from a plank, and trimmed the handle and the point with his knife; and then he set to work on his three sandhills, cutting down the side of each where it rounded down into the cup-like hollow, and flinging the sand into the cup itself to make a level floor. The building of such a house was entirely new to him, but he had brains and he bent them all to every problem that presented itself, and never failed to find the way out. For instance,--the space he wished his house to occupy between the sandhills was quite twelve feet in width, and his planks ran mostly to six or eight feet only. There must therefore be a row of posts in the middle, with one or more beams on top as a ridge-pole, from which he could carry side pieces to the walls six feet away on either side, and he had foreseen some difficulty in fixing these posts absolutely rigid in the yielding sand. If they wobbled or gave in any direction his roof would be in danger.