A half of a sack, carefully raveled out, would furnish a couple of handfuls of thread.

Had it not been for this resource all our sewing and mending would have come to a standstill.
Most of our needles were manufactured by ourselves from bones.

A piece of bone, split as near as possible to the required size, was carefully rubbed down upon a brick, and then had an eye laboriously worked through it with a bit of wire or something else available for the purpose.
The needles were about the size of ordinary darning needles, and answered the purpose very well.
These devices gave one some conception of the way savages provide for the wants of their lives.

Time was with them, as with us, of little importance.

It was no loss of time to them, nor to us, to spend a large portion of the waking hours of a week in fabricating a needle out of a bone, where a civilized man could purchase a much better one with the product of three minutes' labor.