The walls were unplastered and the
rafters unceiled; the whole bearing a most barnlike and unhospitable appearance.
It was a very small stuffy fusty room, with boards, and
rafters, and cobwebs, and lath and plaster.
The floor was formed by the
rafters, with thin lath-and-plaster between, so that in walking one had to step from beam to beam.
Then Ulysses and his son made all haste to take the helmets, shields, and spears inside; and Minerva went before them with a gold lamp in her hand that shed a soft and brilliant radiance, whereon Telemachus said, "Father, my eyes behold a great marvel: the walls, with the
rafters, crossbeams, and the supports on which they rest are all aglow as with a flaming fire.
It was as though they were passing along a beaten highway in the center of a civilized community; and yet she knew that the men who lolled upon the verandahs, puffing indolently upon their cigarettes or chewing betel nut, were all head hunters, and that along the verandah
rafters above them hung the grisly trophies of their prowess.
But Ngurn's father, wrapped in decaying grass-matting and hanging even then over their heads among the smoky rafters of the devil-devil house, had held otherwise.
He stood up, and from the dim rafters, grimed with the smoking of countless heads, where day was no more than a gloom, took down a matting-wrapped parcel and began to open it.
The
rafters, I observed, were made out of the timbers of a ship.
The roof, composed of beams and
rafters, had nothing to divide the apartment from the sky excepting the planking and thatch; there was a huge fireplace at either end of the hall, but as the chimneys were constructed in a very clumsy manner, at least as much of the smoke found its way into the apartment as escaped by the proper vent.
The lodge was a ruin of black granite and bared ribs of
rafters, but facing it was a new building, half constructed, the first fruit of Sir Charles's South African gold.
When she went to bed last night, after preparing her father's supper, there had been a dresser at the window: what had become of the salt-bucket, the meal-tub, the hams that should be hanging from the
rafters? There were no
rafters; it was a papered ceiling.
A veritable witness have you hitherto been, Ishmael; but have a care how you seize the privilege of Jonah alone; the privilege of discoursing upon the joists and beams; the
rafters, ridge-pole, sleepers, and under-pinnings, making up the frame-work of leviathan; and belike of the tallow-vats, dairy-rooms, butteries, and cheeseries in his bowels.
There stands his house--been empty ever since; a log house, with a plank roof--just one big room, and no more; no ceiling--nothing between the
rafters and the floor.
From the heavy wooden
rafters which formed the roof there hung rows of hooks which held up sides of bacon, joints of smoked beef, and strings of onions for winter use.
So I went on for some days cutting and hewing timber, and also studs and
rafters, all with my narrow axe, not having many communicable or scholar-like thoughts, singing to myself, -- Men say they know many things; But lo!
