Next, the canoe is turned upside-down and all seams are gummed smoothly on the outside. The ends, from the beginning of the seam to above the waterline, may be heavily gummed and then covered with a narrow strip of thin bark, heavily enough smeared with gum to cause it to adhere over the seam. In more recent times a piece of gummed cloth was used here. Above this protective strip, the end seams are filled with gum so that the outside can be smoothed off flush on the face of the cutwater between the stitches. All seams in the side and bottom are gummed smooth and any holes or patches remaining to be gummed are taken care of in this final inspection. If the canoe is to be decorated (not many types were) the outside of the bark is moistened and the rough, reddish winter bark, or inner rind, is scraped away, leaving only enough to form the desired decorations. When paints of various colors could be obtained, these were also employed, but the use of the inner rind was apparently the older and more common method of decorating. The paddles are made from splints of spruce or maple, ash, white cedar, or larch. Two forms of blade were used by the Malecite. The older form is long and narrow, with the blade wide near the top and the taper straight along each edge to a narrow, rounded point. Above the greatest width, the blade tapers almost straight along the edge, coming into an oval handle very quickly. At the head, the handle is widened and it ends squared off, but the taper toward the handle is straight, not flared as in modern canoe paddles; there is no swelling. Paddles of a shape similar to this, some without a wide handle, were used by other eastern Indians. The more recent form of Malecite paddle has a long leaf-shaped, or beaver-tail, blade, much like that of the modern canoe paddle, except that it ends in a dull point; the handle is as in the old form but the head is swelled to form the upper grip. The face of the blade, in both old and new form, has a noticeable ridge down the centerline. [Illustration: Figure 46 GENERAL DETAILS OF BIRCH-BARK CANOE CONSTRUCTION, in a drawing by Adney. (From _Harper's Young People_, supplement, July 29, 1890.)] The eastern style of construction described here produced what might be called a wide-bottom canoe with some tumble-home above the turn of the bilge, but a different method of construction was used to produce canoes having a narrow bottom and flaring sides. These canoes were not set up on the building bed, in the first steps of shaping the hull, with the gunwale frame on the cover bark. Instead, a special building frame, mentioned earlier, was used. Each tribe using the building frame had its own style, but the variations were confined to minor matters or to proportion of width to length.