We must pass over six weeks, during which the labor was continued
without intermission, and the house was raised, of logs, squared and
well fitted; the windows and doors were also put in, and the roof well
covered in with large squares of birch-bark, firmly fixed on the
rafters. The house consisted of one large room, as a dining-room, and
the kitchen, with a floor of well-beaten clay, a smaller room, as a
sitting-room, and three bedrooms, all of which were floored; one of the
largest of them fitted all round with bed-places against the walls, in
the same way as on board of packets; this room was for the four boys,
and had two spare bed-places in it. The others, which were for the two
girls and Mr. and Mrs. Campbell, were much smaller. But before the house
was half built, a large outhouse adjoining to it had been raised to hold
the stores which Mr. Campbell had brought with him, with a rough granary
made above the store-room. The interior of the house was not yet fitted
up, although the furniture had been put in, and the family slept in it,
rough as it was, in preference to the tents, as they were very much
annoyed with musquitoes. The stores were now safe from the weather, and
they had a roof over their heads, which was the grand object that was to
be obtained. The carpenters were still very busy fitting up the interior
of the house, and the other men were splitting rails for a snake-fence
and also selecting small timber for raising a high palisade round the
premises. Martin had not been idle. The site of the house was just where
the brushwood joined to the prairie, and Martin had been clearing it
away and stacking it, and also collecting wood for winter fuel. It had
been decided that the four cows, which had been driven round from the
fort, should be housed during the winter in the small building on the
other side of the stream, which had belonged to Malachi Bone, as it was
surrounded with a high snake-fence, and sufficiently large to hold them
and even more. The commandant had very kindly selected the most quiet
cows to milk, and Mary and Emma Percival had already entered upon their
duties: the milk had been put into the store-house until a dairy could
be built up. A very neat bridge had been thrown across the stream, and
every morning the two girls, generally attended by Henry, Alfred, or
Captain Sinclair, crossed over, and soon became expert in their new
vocation as dairy-maids. Altogether, things began to wear a promising
appearance. Henry and Mr. Campbell had dug up as fast as Martin and
Alfred cleared away the brushwood, and the garden had already been
cropped with such few articles as could be put in at the season. The
commandant had some pigs ready for the settlers as soon as they were
ready to receive them, and had more than once come up in the boats to
ascertain their progress and to offer any advice that he might consider
useful.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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