The private apartment of the house chief occupied the central portion of the upper rear platform, and was partitioned off in front, by a screen of thin native-split red cedar planks of varying widths, neatly fitted vertically, and sewed together with withes of spruce root, countersunk, to make it appear a solid piece. It extended between the two rear carved posts that supported the roof structure, and was twenty feet long by nine and a half feet high. The front surface was smoothed with dogfish skin or equisetum, and elaborately carved in low relief and painted to represent the rain spirit, which was symbolized by the great central figure with outstretched arms, while the small crouching figures in the border around the sides and top known as Su-con-nutchee "raindrops splash up," represented the splash of the falling drops after striking the ground. The whole partition was called Su-kheen "rain wall." The round hole through the body, over which was formerly hung a dressed caribou or goatskin, formed the entrance to the chamber, which received its only light and ventilation over the top of the screen from the smoke hole in the roof. There seems to be a difference of opinion today as to who executed this work. Yehlh-kok the present chief of the family says that it was done by Kate-tsu, the chief who built the house, and that the painting was the work of Skeet-lah-ka, a later chief and an artist of wide repute, the father of Chartrich, who in 1834 just prior to the lease of the littoral by the Russian Government to the Hudson's Bay Company, accompanied the first Russians who ascended the Chilkat River, which would carry it well back in the early portion of the last century which was the Victorian age of Northwest Coast art. Others, while agreeing as to the painting, claim that the carving was designed and executed by a Tsimshian. But whether the work of the former or the latter, the conventionalized design, and particularly the multiplicity of small figures around the principal one is essentially Tsimshian in character and entirely different from the realism of Tlingit art. It is unquestionably the finest example of native art, either Tlingit or Tsimshian, in Alaska, in boldness of conception,--although highly conventionalized in form,--in execution of detail, and in the selection and arrangement of colors.