The sawing of the tree-trunks lasted for nearly three weeks, and the
Dandy, being the under-man in the pit, had anything but a merry time.
Down in the pit, away from the air, he worked; pulling and pushing,
pushing and pulling, hour after hour, in a blinding stream of sawdust.
When we offered him sympathy and a gossamer veil, he accepted the veil
gratefully, but waved the sympathy aside, saying it was "all in the good
cause." Nothing was ever a hardship to the Dandy, excepting dirt.
Johnny being a past-master in his trade, stood on the platform in the
upper air, guiding the saw along the marked lines; and as he instructed
us all in the fine art of pit-sawing, Dan decided that the building of a
house, under some circumstances, could be an education in itself.
"Thought she might manage to learn a thing or two out of it," he said.
"The building of it is right enough. It all depends what she uses it for
when Johnny's done with it."
As the pliant saw coaxed beams, and slabs, and flooring boards out of the
forest trees I grew to like beginning at the beginning of things, and
realised there was an underlying truth in Dan's whimsical reiteration,
that "the missus was in luck when she struck this place"; for beams and
slabs and flooring boards wrested from Nature amid merrymaking and
philosophical discourses are not as other beams and slabs and flooring
boards.
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