2. Though birch be of all other the worst of timber, yet has it its various uses, as for the husbandman’s ox-yoaks; also for hoops, small screws, paniers, brooms, wands, bavin-bands, and wythes for fagots; and claims a memory for arrows, bolts, shafts, (our old English artillery;) also for dishes, bowls, ladles, and other domestic utensils, in the good old days of more simplicity, yet of better and truer hospitality. In New-England our Northern Americans make canoos, boxes, buckets, kettles, dishes, which they sow, and joyn very curiously with thread made of cedar-roots, and divers other domestical utensils, as baskets, baggs, with this tree, whereof they have a blacker kind; and out of a certain excrescence from the bole, a _fungus_, which being boil’d, beaten, and dry’d in an oven, makes excellent spunck or touch-wood, and balls to play withal; and being reduc’d to powder, astringent, is an infallible remedy in the hœmerhoids. They make also not only this small ware, but even small-craft, pinnaces of birch, ribbing them with white cedar, and covering them with large flakes of birch-bark, sow them with thread of spruse-roots, and pitch them, as it seems we did even here in Britain, as well as the Veneti, making use of the willow, whereof Lucan, When Sicoris to his own banks restor’d, Had quit the field, of twigs, and willow-board They build small craft, cover’d with bullocks-hide, In which they reach’d the rivers farther side: So sail the Veneti if Padus flow, The Britains sail on their rough ocean so.{142:1}