e river here presented to view, on such
a strange conveyance, and surrounded with so wild and savage a horde of
men as the raftsmen were,--especially since, as he supposed, there was
not a human being on board with whom he could exchange a word of
conversation. It is true the commissioner whom his uncle George had sent
was on the raft. He had come out in the same boat with Rollo, and had
remained when the boat went back to the shore. But Rollo had not noticed
him particularly. He observed, it is true, that two men came with him to
the raft, and that only one returned; but he thought it probable that
the other might be going down the river a little way, or perhaps that he
belonged to the raft. He had not the least idea that the man had come to
take charge of _him_, and so he felt as if he were entirely alone in
the new and strange scene to which he found himself so suddenly
transferred.

There were, however, so many things to attract his attention that at
first he had no time to think much of his loneliness. There was a fire
burning at a certain part of the raft, not far from the door of one of
the houses, and he went to see it. As soon as he reached it, the mystery
in respect to the means of having a fire on such a structure, without
setting the boards and timbers on fire, was at once solved. Rollo found
that the fire was built upon a hearth of _sand_. There was a large box,
about four feet square and a foot deep, which box was filled with sand,
and the fire was built in the middle of it. It seemed to Rollo that this
was a very easy way to make a fireplace, especially as the sand seemed
to be of a very common kind, such as the raftsmen had probably shovelled
up somewhere on the shore of the river.

"The very next time I build a raft," said Rollo, "I will have a fire on
it in exactly that way."

There was a sort of barricade or screen built up on two sides of this
fire, to keep the wind from blowing the flame and the heat away from the
kettle that was hung over it. This screen was made of short boards,
nailed to three posts, that were placed in such a manner as to make,
when the boards were nailed to them, two short fences, at right angles
to each other, or like two sides of a high box. The corner of this
screen was turned towards the wind, and thus the fire was sheltered. A
pole passed across from one of the posts to the other, and the kettle
was hung upon the pole.

After examining this fireplace Rollo went to look