Cottage Building in Cob, Pisé, Chalk and Clay: A Renaissance (2nd edition)

AUTHOR’S PREFACE TO THE SECOND EDITION

The exhaustion of the first edition of this book, within so short a time of its publication, makes it difficult to add much new matter for the reissue now called for, or, in the light of subsequent research and experience, to revise what had already been written.

Any book that seemed to show a way of meeting the present building difficulties, however partially, was fairly assured of a welcome, but the somewhat unforeseen demand for my small contribution to the great volume of literature on cottage-building is, I think, to be attributed chiefly to its description of Pisé-building.

Of the very large number of letters that reach me from readers of the book, quite ninety-nine out of every hundred are concerned with Pisé.

The other methods of building have their advocates and exponents, but it is clearly Pisé that has caught the attention of the public as well as of the Press both at home and abroad, and it is to this method of construction that I have chiefly devoted my attention since the writing of the book as it first appeared.

In our English climate Pisé-building is a summer craft, and the small-scale experiments of one person through a single summer cannot in the nature of things add very greatly to the sum of our knowledge of what is possible with Pisé and of what is not.

Most of the new data have come through the building of Mr. Strachey’s demonstration house, an account of which is included in the present volume.

At the time of writing, various tests are being carried out with the help of the National Physical Laboratory; but the results, though exceedingly encouraging, are not yet ready for publication.1

The fact that Pisé-building is essentially a “Dry-earth method” makes necessary the creation of artificial summer conditions under which the experiments may be conducted during the past winter. As a result of these researches, a considerable mass of useful data has become available for the opening of the present building season.2

Much helpful information is also likely to come to us from the Colonies, particularly from Rhodesia and British East Africa, where there is great activity in Pisé-building, and where there is no “close season” such as our winter imposes upon us here.

It is instructive also to note that great interest in Pisé-building has been aroused in Canada and in Scandinavia, the two countries that we were wont to associate particularly with timber-building.

From both I have received a number of letters complaining of “the lumber shortage,” and discussing the advantages of Pisé as compared with their traditional wood-construction.

If these great timber countries are themselves feeling the pinch, the advocates of wooden houses for England may find that they are not merely barking up the wrong tree, but up a tree that is not even there.

The timber famine is, in any case, a calamity to anyone dependent on building, that is to everyone, for even a Pisé house must still have a roof and floors and joinery.

But to invoke the timber house as our salvation under existing conditions seems to be singularly perverse and unhelpful. Pisé, at all events, seems to offer us a more promising field for exploration than most of the other heterodox methods of construction that have been suggested, too often upon credentials that will not bear any but the most cursory scrutiny.

Pisé, even now, is still in its experimental infancy.

It has yet to prove itself in the fields of National Housing and of competitive commercial building schemes on a large scale.

Lastly, Pisé does not claim to solve the housing problem. There is no solution unless, by some miracle, the present purchasing power of the sovereign appreciates by 200 per cent.

Clough Williams-Ellis.

22, South Eaton Place,
 London, S.W.1.
   May 1920.

CONTENTS

All indented sections were added by the transcriber.

PAGE
INTRODUCTION		11
VI	Pisé in Moulds
VIII	Cob and Chalk
IX	A Postscript
X	Pliny on Pisé de Terre
GENERAL SURVEY		26
I
COB		33
§ I.	General
§ II.	Method of Building
§ III.	Conclusion
II
PISÉ DE TERRE		57
§ I.	General
§ II.	Method of Building
§ III.	The Theory and Science of Pisé
§ IV.	Indian and Colonial Practice
III
CHALK		107
§I.	General
IV
UNBURNED CLAY AND EARTH BRICKS		121
APPENDIX		127
I	Whitewash
II	The Importance Of Using Local Materials
III	Extract From a Letter to the Editor of Country Life
IV	Pisé Tests
INDEX		139

ILLUSTRATIONS

Some illustrations have been moved to bring them nearer the related text. The bracketed page number shows their original location.

COB HOUSE BUILT BY MR. ERNEST GIMSON, NEAR BUDLEIGH SALTERTON, DEVON

Frontispiece

FACING PAGE
PISÉ WAGGON-HOUSE AT NEWLANDS CORNER	18
THE NEWLANDS WAGGON-HOUSE (INTERIOR)	18
THE BEGINNING OF A PISÉ FRUIT-HOUSE	19
THE FRUIT-HOUSE COMPLETED WITH ROOF OF PEAT BLOCKS ON ROUGH BOARDING	19
MODEL OF A PISÉ DE TERRE HOUSE TO BE BUILT IN THREE SUCCESSIVE STAGES	22
WAYSIDE STATION OF PISÉ AT SIMONDIUM, SOUTH AFRICA, DESIGNED BY MR. HERBERT BAKER	23
FRONT AND BACK ELEVATIONS OF COTTAGE DESIGNED BY SIR EDWIN LUTYENS AND MR. ALBAN SCOTT	28
PLAN OF COTTAGE DESIGNED BY SIR EDWIN LUTYENS AND MR. ALBAN SCOTT	29
ANOTHER VIEW OF THE COB HOUSE BUILT BY MR. ERNEST GIMSON, NEAR BUDLEIGH SALTERTON, DEVON	34
A FINE SPECIMEN OF A DEVONSHIRE COB HOUSE	35
A DEVONSHIRE COB FARMHOUSE, PROBABLY BETWEEN 200 AND 300 YEARS OLD	36
A COB-BUILT VILLAGE	37
A DEVONSHIRE FARM, LOCAL MATERIAL (COB)	42
DEVON COUNTRY HOUSE, BUILT OF DEVON COB	43
COB HOUSE TEMP. ELIZABETH, LEWISHILL	44
ANOTHER DEVONSHIRE (COB) FARMHOUSE, WEEKE BARTON	45
CEILINGS OF MODELLED PLASTER FROM OLD COB HOUSES IN DEVON	46
A COB GARDEN-WALL WITH THATCHED COPING	47
PISÉ PLANT AND IMPLEMENTS	58
DIAGRAM OF MARK V PISÉ SHUTTERING	88
MARK V SHUTTERING	89
A SIMPLE MOULD FOR PISÉ BLOCKS	90
BLOCK-MOULDS, LARGE AND SMALL	90
SKETCH OF A PISÉ HOUSE IN COURSE OF ERECTION	91
THE NEWLANDS CORNER BUILDING	92
THE COTTAGE FROM THE SOUTH-EAST	93
THE GARDEN COURT	93
THE BACKYARD	94
FRAMING THE ROOF	95
AN INTERIOR, SHOWING FIRE-BRICK HEARTH FIRE	95
DETAILS OF CHALK CONSTRUCTION AT AMESBURY	110
COTTAGES AT COLDHARBOUR, AMESBURY	111
THREE CHALK COTTAGES AT HURSLEY PARK	114
MARSH COURT, HAMPSHIRE	116
BRICK-AND-CHALK VAULTING AT THE DEANERY GARDEN, SONNING	117
ONCE CORN HALL, NOW COUNCIL SCHOOL	122
A ROW OF CLAY-LUMP COTTAGES	122
ENGINEERING WORKSHOPS	123

CONSIDERATIONS

“If all available brickworks were to produce at their highest limit of output and with all the labour they wanted at their disposal they could only turn out 4,000,000,000 bricks in a year as against a pre-war average of 2,800,000,000.”—(See Report by Committee appointed by Ministry of Reconstruction to consider the post-war position of building.)

---

The first year’s programme of working-class housing alone calls for at least 6,000,000,000 bricks. That is to say, unless wall materials other than brick are freely used, we shall fall alarmingly short of what the population of Great Britain needs in bare accommodation, and all building and engineering projects whatsoever other than housing must be postponed indefinitely.

---

“The country districts of england and wales are unsurpassed for variety and beauty of character, and it would be nothing less than a national misfortune if the increased development of small holdings were to result in the erection of buildings unsuited to their environment and ugly in appearance.”—(Extract from the report submitted by the Departmental Committee appointed to inquire as to Buildings for Small Holdings, 1913.)

INTRODUCTION

I

The country is faced by a dilemma probably greater and more poignant than any with which it has hitherto had to deal. It needs, and needs at once, a million new houses, and it has not only utterly inadequate stores of material with which to build them, but has not even the plant by which that material can be rapidly created. There is not merely a shortage, but an actual famine everywhere as regards the things out of which houses are made. Bricks are wanted by the ten thousand million, but there are practically no bricks in sight. All that the brickyards of the United Kingdom can do, working all day and every day, is to turn out something like four thousand million a year. But to those who want houses at once, what is the use of a promise of bricks in five years’ time? To tell them to turn to the stone quarries is a mere derision. Let alone the cost of work and of transport, it is only in a few favoured places that the rocks will give us what we want. Needless to say we are short, too, of lime and cement, and probably shall be shorter. No coal, no quicklime, and No coal, no cement, and as things look now, it is going to be a case, if not of no coal, at any rate of much less coal. Even worse is the shortage in timber—the material hitherto deemed essential for the making of roofs, doors, windows and floors. Raw timber is hardly obtainable, and seasoned timber does not exist. The same story has to be told about tiles, slates, corrugated iron, and every other form of “legitimate” roofing substance. There are none to be had.

In this dread predicament what are we to do as a nation? What we must not do is at any rate quite clear. We must not lie down in the high road of civilisation and cry out that we are ruined or betrayed, or that the world is too hard for us, and that we must give up the task of living in houses. Whether we like it or not we have got to do something about the housing question, and we have got to do it at once, and there is an end. Translated into terms of action, this means that as we have not got enough of the old forms of material we must turn to others and learn how to house ourselves with materials such as we have not used before. Once again necessity must be the mother of invention, or rather, of invention and revival, for in anything so old and universal as the housing problem it is too late to be ambitious. Here we always find that there has been an ancient Assyrian or Egyptian or a primitive man in front of us.

It is the object of the present book to attack part of the problem of how to build without bricks, and indeed without mortar, and equally important, as far as possible without the vast cost of transporting the heavy material of the house from one quarter of England to another. That is my apology for introducing to the public a work dealing with what I can hear old-fashioned master-builders describing as the “bastard” forms of construction. One of these is Pisé de terre, the old system of building with walls formed of rammed or compressed earth: a system which was once known throughout Europe and of which the primitive tribesmen of Arizona and New Mexico knew the secret. Down to our own day it has been practised with wonderful success in the Valley of the Rhône. Then come our own cob, once the cottage material par excellence of Devonshire and the West of England, our system of building with plain clay blocks, a plan indigenous in the Eastern counties, and again the use of chalk and chalk pisé.

The Search for Cheap Material

Pisé de Terre

For me Pisé de terre, ever since I heard of it, has offered special attractions. It, and it alone provides, or if one must be cautious, appears to provide the way to turn an old dream of mine and of many other people into a reality. My connection with the problem of housing, and especially of rural housing, i.e. cottage housing, now nearly a quarter of a century old, has been on the side of cheap material. Rightly or wrongly (I know that many great experts in building matters think quite wrongly), I have had the simplicity to believe that if you are to get cheap housing you must get it by the use of cheap material. It has always seemed to me that there is no other way. What more natural than first to ask why building material was so dear, and then what was the cause of its dearness? I found it in the fact that bricks are very expensive things to make, that stones are very expensive things to quarry, that cements are very expensive things to manufacture, and worst of all, that all these things are very heavy and very expensive to drag about the country, and to “dump” on the site in some lonely situation where cottages or a small-holder’s house and outbuildings are, to use the conventional phrase, “urgently demanded.” Therefore, to the unfeigned amusement, nay, contempt of all my architectural friends, I spent a great deal of my leisure in the years before the war in racking my brains in the search for cheap material. My deep desire was to find something in the earth out of which walls could be made. My ideal was a man or group of men with spades and pickaxes coming upon the land and creating the walls of a house out of what they found there. I wanted my house, my cottage in “Cloud-Cuckoo Land,” to rise like the lark from the furrows. But I was at once dissuaded from my purpose by cautious and scientific persons. The chemists, if they did not scoff like the architects, were visibly perturbed. “Your dream is impossible,” they said. “Nature abhors it as much as she used to be supposed to abhor a vacuum. If your soil is clay, and you can afford the time and cost of erecting kilns, and bringing coal to the spot to make the bricks, you can no doubt turn the earth on the spot into a house, but even then you had far better buy them of those that sell. Your dream of having some chemical which will mix with the earth and turn it into a kind of stone, is the merest delusion. It is the nature of the earth to kill anything in the way of cement that is mixed with it. For example, even a little earth will kill concrete or mortar. Unless you wash your sand most carefully, and free it from all earth stain, you will ruin your concrete blocks.” I appeared to be literally “up against” a brick wall. It was that or nothing. And then, and when things seemed at their very worst, a kind correspondent of The Spectator showed me a way of escape. I felt like a man lost in underground passages who suddenly sees a tiny square of light and knows that it means the way out. Somebody wrote, from South Africa I think, asking why I didn’t find the thing I wanted in Pisé de terre, much used in Australia, and occasionally in Cape Colony. Then came a rush of enlightenment. People who had seen and even lived in such houses wrote to The Spectator, and the world indeed for the moment seemed alive with Pisé de terre. I was even lent the “Farmer’s Handbook” of New South Wales, in which the State Government provides settlers with an elaborate description of how to build in Pisé, and how to make the necessary shuttering for doing so. It was then, too, that I began to hear of the seventeenth and eighteenth-century buildings of Pisé in the Rhone Valley. In fact, everybody but I seemed to know all there was to be known about Pisé de terre. For the moment indeed, the situation seemed like that described in Punch’s famous picture of the young lady and the German professor. “What is Volapuk?” asks the young lady. “Ze universal language,” says the professor. “Where is it spoken?” “No vairs.” Pisé de terre appeared to be the universal system of building, but as far as I could make out, it was practised “no vairs,” or at any rate not in Europe.

Experiments with “Pisé”

II

I had got as far as the position described above, when down swept the war upon Europe, and everything had to be postponed in favour of the immediate need of filling the ranks of the nation’s army and teaching the men how to fight our enemies. As the war went on, however, the demand for rapid, cheap, and temporary building became very great, and I felt I should be justified in trying some experiments with Pisé de terre, even in spite of the difficulty of obtaining labour.

I think I can best illustrate the nature of Pisé and what it can do, and I believe will do, if I shortly recount in chronological order these humble pioneer efforts.

In the summer of 1915 I found that it was necessary in the interests of the hospital established in my house to find a place in which to store apples, for the men in blue consumed them in incredible quantities. I thought I would try Pisé. Accordingly, I had some shuttering made on the Australian model—not splendid scientific shuttering such as is described in the body of this work, but still shuttering quite sufficient for the purpose. With great rapidity a little fruit-house was put up, roofed with boards, and covered with blocks of compressed peat in order to make a roof which would be both vermin-proof and also keep out the heat and the frost. In my ignorance and my hurry, I now find that I violated every sound rule of Pisé construction. I built the walls during a week of rain, when the earth was wet, which was a great mistake; and I did not clear out the stones, which was another error that prevented the walls from being homogeneous. Worst of all, as soon as the walls were built (and very pretty walls they were, looking something like soft brown marble), I painted them over with tar, which of course would not enter the wet wall, but only made a skin, which in a few months peeled off exactly like the bark off a plane tree. Yet in spite of this ignorant mishandling of my material, the little fruit-house is still standing and sheltered till January the few apples Nature allowed us to gather last autumn. It looks disreputable, but there has been no structural collapse, nor will there be.

 

The Beginning of a Pisé Fruit-house.

 

The Fruit-house Completed With Roof of Peat Blocks on Rough Boarding.

Rammed Chalk, “Pisé de Craie”

No sooner was the fruit-house finished than I was met by the demand of my wife, the commandant of the hospital, to add to my house a patients’ dining-room, which would be bright, dry, airy, warm, and comfortable, and be large enough for forty men to have their meals in, and to use as a sitting-room during the rest of the day. The local builder said that it was impossible to make a wooden addition, for there was no wood to be procured, or to build in bricks, since my house stands 600 ft. above the sea on an isolated chalk down. Crœsus would have found it difficult at that time to build on my site, and for the ordinary economic man—“L’homme à quarantes écus”—it was quite impossible. But the room had got to be built, for the men were there, and built at once, since the out-of-door life of July and August could not continue. There was nothing to do but to fall back upon Pisé. I decided to be ambitious and to experiment, not merely in Pisé de terre, but in what I then thought—and perhaps rightly—was a new form of Pisé, i.e. Pisé de craie or compressed chalk. My shuttering therefore was put up. A hole not very far off was dug in the earth, the chalk which was almost at the surface was quarried out, and we began to build the wall, candid and contemptuous friends telling us of course that the chalk wall would never stand the frosts in so exposed a position, and that the wall, if made, would certainly explode! Everyone worked at that wall; the nursing staff, the coachman, an occasional visitor, a schoolboy, a couple of boy scouts, members of the National Reserve who were guarding a “vulnerable point” close by, and even some of the patients. Patients as a rule will endure any toil with the utmost good temper if it is for the purposes of sport. If the task is useful it does not interest them. Still, a wall which might explode offered a certain attraction. We worked with more zeal than discretion, but happily I had it in my mind that homogeneity was the essential, and therefore the hard nuggets of chalk as they were thrown into the shuttering to be compressed by the rammers were first chopped up with spades, much as one minces meat. The wall had no foundations. In Pisé you can make your foundations, so to speak, as you go, through the simple process of ramming. Anyway, and to cut a long story short, the wall was made, was able to receive the roof, for which happily the local builder found some material, and not only did the wall stand, but showed a very creditable exterior. Its weight was of course enormous, for there were some twenty tons of chalk put into it. In spite of the irregularity of the labour it did not take more than ten or twelve days to build. To prevent the wet and frost getting into it, I painted the main front with a patent liquid material for rendering walls damp-proof. The Chalk Pisé wall not only served its purpose, but served it very well. The room proved extraordinarily warm and comfortable, largely owing no doubt to the fact of a solid, very dry, 18-in. wall on the north-east side.

III

My next venture was in response to an urgent appeal from a farm tenant to build him a waggon house. The result is seen in the accompanying illustration. This building, about 40 ft. by 30 ft., was made purely of earth, but some experiments were tried in the way of introducing hurdles into the shuttering in order to afford a surface to which plaster could easily cling. Suffice it to say that the plain earth, without plaster or any covering, more than justified itself. One part of the wall is very much exposed to the weather, but it has stood the rains and the frosts of three very bad winters without turning a hair. Lovers of the picturesque may like to know that it presents a pleasant face of light ochre, upon which a pale green efflorescence of lichen has appeared of late. Anyway, the frost has not touched it.

 

Pisé Waggon-house at Newlands Corner.
An experiment in rendering.

 

The Newlands Waggon-house.
Interior. 

IV

Next I made some experiments in chalk farmyard walls. Unfortunately, however, one of these, which was not made homogeneous by chalk mincing, i.e. in which the nuggets of chalk were not properly broken up, got the wet into it, and true to the candid friend’s prophecy did literally explode in the big frost of 1917-18. Another very pretty chalk wall is, however, standing to this day. But though Chalk Pisé will, I think, do well if properly made and properly protected, it is somewhat of a doubtful material for anything except a building with a good overlay of roof. Another structure put up by me was a largish gardener’s potting shed. This was built purely of earth, and in dry weather. When the walls were perfectly dry, the local road authorities kindly came with their tar spray and sprayed it with hot tar, with most excellent results. The hot tar really entered instead of merely making a skin, with the result that the external walls thus treated resembled a section of tarred road stood up on end.

I may add that I lent my Pisé shuttering to a Guildford Volunteer Battalion, who in a ten-hour day, or rather, two days of five hours each, built an excellent hut about 20 ft. square and 10 ft. high, and thus showed that a platoon might house themselves with Pisé in a day, provided they had roofing material ready. This building had subsequently to be destroyed, because the ground on which it stood was wanted for another purpose. When it was knocked down the house-breakers were astonished at the strength and tenacity of the walls. Yet the earth out of which they were made was particularly bad—as one of the volunteers expressed it, not earth, but merely leaf-mould and horse-manure. The site had, as a matter of fact, been a suburban garden for at least two hundred years.

V

Before I leave the record of these terrestrial adventures I may note that in the early stages I received a great deal of help and encouragement from General Sir Robert Scott-Moncrieff. He was indeed so much struck by them that he drew up a series of instructions for walls of Pisé work which were issued to all engineer companies at the front in case they might have opportunities for experimenting. These instructions were based upon the Australian book and embodied the very simple form of shuttering there recommended. The diagram that accompanied them is reproduced in the Appendix to the present volume.

Pisé in Moulds

VI
Pisé in Moulds

There is one thing more to be said about Pisé. I believe that a useful development of the system may be found in the plan of ramming earth into moulds and making earth blocks, something like concrete blocks. Moulds of this kind are easy to make and are specially suitable when the soil is somewhat clayey in its nature. They have the advantage of being much cheaper than shuttering, and of being capable of being handled by one man without assistance. With a strong wooden mould and a good rammer a small-holder may easily build his own pigsty, his own chicken house, and all the small outbuildings he requires, if not indeed add an extra room to his house. I am at present experimenting with these blocks and only yesterday had the pleasure of seeing a sergeant (R.A.M.C), discharged through ill-health and now trying to turn himself into a small-holder, building a pigsty with the help of one of my moulds.

VII

Apropos of the elusive universality and yet non-existence of Pisé work, the following personal anecdote or footnote to compressed earth may amuse my readers. Happening to be sleeping in a bedroom at Brooks’s Club in 1916, I noticed a charming Regency bookcase full of old books. Among them was a copy of a Cyclopædia of 1819. I thought it would be amusing to see whether there was any mention of Pisé de terre. What was my astonishment to find that what I thought was my own special and peculiar hobby and discovery was treated therein at very great length and with very great ability, but treated not in the least as anything new or wonderful, but instead as “this well-known and greatly appreciated system of building, etc., etc.” To complete the irony of the situation the fact was mentioned that a Mr. Holland had lately sent to the Board of Agriculture a memorandum as to how to put up houses and farm-buildings in this form of construction. My hair rose on my head, for I had just committed a similar official indiscretion myself, and had been bombarding appropriate authorities with what I thought must be a complete novelty. Truly one can never be first or do anything new. It is always “in the Files,” as Mr. Kipling says. Even in our most original moments we only keep on feebly imitating somebody else. The claim to originality is nothing but a muddy mixture of pride and ignorance. What did, however, somewhat amaze me was the calm statement of the Cyclopædia that this system of building was now well known in the counties of—and then came the names of practically all the counties of Southern England. And yet I had been keenly on the look-out for such buildings for several years. The cynic will say that they had all fallen down. That only shows the weakness of the cynic’s point of view. The truth is they are often concealed under various disguises of plaster, paint, and weather tiles. Few people know what their own walls are really made of till they try to cut a new opening for a door or a window in them.

Cob and Chalk

VIII
Cob and Chalk

Of Cob I know little by actual experiment. It is fully dealt with in the body of this work, and readers will find that it is a kind of mud or clay concrete reinforced with straw. It is therefore totally and absolutely different from Pisé. One is wet, the other dry.

All that need be said about chalk is said by the author of the present book.

IX
A Postscript

In the body of this work mention is made of a very successful experiment in Pisé de terre made by the officials of a Rhodesian mining company; the outcome, I am proud to think, of my pre-war advocacy of Pisé in The Spectator. No sooner had my introduction been finished than there came by way of postscript an exceedingly interesting series of photographs, sent to me by Mr. Pickstone, a gentleman very well known in South Africa for his fruit gardens, his peaches, and his apricots. On the strength of what he had read in The Spectator, Mr. Pickstone lately undertook to build a station building and station-master’s house for the railway station at Simondium in the Drakenstein Valley, a place which during the summer is noted for its great heat. In the January number of the South African Railways and Harbours Magazine, Mr. Pickstone gives a detailed account of his bold and successful experiment and illustrates it by a reproduction of some of his photographs. Here is his own account of what he did.

Pisé—a South African Lead

“It must have been about eighteen months ago that the railway administration decided to promote Simondium Siding to the dignity of a station. As a siding, it had always been a busy place in the fruit season, during which time a permanent checker had for some years been kept quite busy, his accommodation being a couple of small tin shanties, and he had been accustomed to board out where he could. Now we were to have a ‘pukka’ station-master and, presumably, suitable premises. The department quickly got to work and the station-master’s house arrived. It was what one might call a second-hand, or even a third- or fourth-hand one, consisting of the inevitable sheets of galvanised iron and the ever-essential Oregon and Swedish timber. Our new station-master also shortly afterwards arrived, and turned out to be a married man with a wife and four children. The station-master was not a grouser, but during the hot summer—and it is terribly hot in the Drakenstein Valley during that time of the year—he complained to me that it was almost impossible to hold on, owing to the conditions under which he and his family had to live. It was just about this time that I saw in The Spectator a series of articles strongly advocating ‘Pisé de terre’ construction for buildings of all kinds; especially was it recommended as a war-time expedient for rapid and economical construction for barracks and hospitals, and, indeed, it was strongly recommended by Mr. St. Loe Strachey, the editor, for all sorts of general building and military purposes. It is a curious fact, which many readers could verify, that frequently one lives one’s life under certain conditions, and in reality remains absolutely blind to their presence and potentialities. Here was I, living in a country where some of the most beautiful old homesteads are on the principle of the ‘Pisé de terre’ construction, and a large proportion of the older farm buildings in this district also built of similar material, with the additional pleasing accompaniment of beautiful beams, ceilings and floors made of colonial pine—one may advisedly add, the despised colonial pine. Some of these buildings have stood the wear and use of close on a century, and are still an object of joy to those privileged to have an eye to see. Here lived I, as I say, blind to its potentialities for to-day, although it had been clearly appreciated and carried out with the most charming and solid results by our great-grandfathers in the old slave-labour days.”