the required length, you have only to split off the slab. Ah! but suppose
the timber does not split freely, and your heavy maul does; and the
wedges instead of entering have the habit of bouncing out as if they were
fitted with internal springs, and your maul wants renewal several times,
until you find that the timber prescribed is of no account for such
tools; and at best your slabs run off to nothing at half length, and
several trees have to be cut down before you get a single decent slab,
and everybody is peevish with weariness and disappointment, the rudest
house in the bush will be a long time in the building. "Experience is a
hard mistress, yet she teacheth as none other." We came to be more
indebted to the hard mistress--she gave us blistering palms and aching
muscles--than to all the directions and prescriptions of men who claim to
have climbed to the top of the tree in the profession of the "bush." A
"bush" carpenter is a very admirable person, when he is not also a bush
lawyer. Mere amateurs would be wise if they held their enthusiasm in
check when they read the recipe--pat as the recipe for the making of a
rice-pudding--for the construction of even a bark hut. It is so very easy
to write it all down; but if you have had no actual experience in
bark-cutting, and your trees are not in the right condition, you will put
your elation to a shockingly severe test, harden the epidermis of your
hands, and the whole of your heart, and go to bed many nights sadly ere
you get one decent sheet for your roof.

We do not all belong to the ancient and honourable family of the Swiss
Robinsons, who performed a series of unassuming miracles on their island.
There was no practical dispensation of providential favours on our
behalf. Trees that had the reputation of providing splendid splitting
timber defiantly slandered themselves, and others that should have almost
flayed themselves at the first tap of the tomahawk had not the slightest
regard for the reputation vouched for in serious publications.