The chain of ardent labour is continued from the mother to her daughters. Her task was to beget: it is theirs to build. The fury of improvisation is the same in them, however, as it was in her. According to the region and the climate, the tribe, the species, and the work vary. Here they will excavate underground the cave in which they construct their edifice, isolating it from the soil, and preserving it from damp. There they suspend it in the air, and build it of strong coarse pasteboard to defy the heaviest rains. To make this paper or pasteboard, they hasten to the forest, where they select some thoroughly prepared wood, which has been long soaking, and has been already steeped by Nature just as we steep flax. Then within, with a strong sharp tooth (for theirs are not the graceful probosces of bees intended to kiss flowers), they gnaw, and tear, and loosen, and sever the rebellious filaments, pound them into pulp as we do the linen rags, and knead them with a heavy tongue. After the paste has been mixed with a viscous and adhesive saliva, it is spread out into thin layers. With teeth closed like a press, the work is completed. The elementary substance of the pasteboard is prepared. A second industry now commences. The paper manufacturer is transformed into a mason. It has not the beaver's tail to serve as a trowel, but with the American wasp a sort of palette on the leg serves the same purpose. The operation is not the same here as in Guiana. The mason of Cayenne, having built up the walls, has only to suspend to them a succession of floors or platforms, following in that dry hot land the type of our human habitations. But the European mason, working with pasteboard, in a damp climate, where even in the summer heavy rains are frequent, adopts a different plan: _a house within a house_, a hive completely isolated from the envelope which encloses it. This is the most successful device for an ardent and chilly people, whose life-flame needs careful guarding. As it is without, so it is within. As the house, so too the inhabitant. We men are not yet sufficiently acquainted with the influence exercised upon our moral dispositions by our habitations. This duplication of walls, this potent envelopment of a people so completely shut up under its strong twofold enclosure, largely contributes to the unity of the commonwealth.