Six Or Seven Water-Butts Stood In A
Row For His Use.
To windward he had built a fence of flakes, or wattles
as they are called here, well worked in with brushwood, to break the
force of the draught along the hill-side, which would have caused too
fierce a fire.
At one side stood his hut of poles meeting in a cone,
wrapped round with rough canvas. Besides his rake and shovel and a short
ladder, he showed me a tool like an immense gridiron, bent half double,
and fitted to a handle in the same way as a spade. This was for sifting
charcoal when burned, and separating the small from the larger pieces.
Every now and then a puff of smoke rose from the heap and drifted along;
it has a peculiar odour, a dense, thick smell of smothered wood coal, to
me not disagreeable, but to some people so annoying that they have been
known to leave their houses and abandon a locality where charcoal-burning
was practised. Dim memories of old days come crowding round me, invisible
to him, to me visible and alive, of the kings, great hunters, who met
with the charcoal-burners in the vast forests of mediaeval days, of the
noble knights and dames whom the rude charcoal-burners guided to their
castles through trackless wastes, and all the romance of old. Scarcely is
there a tale of knightly adventure that does not in some way or other
mention these men, whose occupation fixed them in the wildernesses which
of yore stretched between cultivated places.
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