Soon however Chapdelaine awoke, refreshed by his sleep and ready for work; then all arose and went out together.
The place where they had worked in the morning was yet full of stumps and overgrown with alders.

They set themselves to cutting and uprooting the alders, gathering a sheaf of branches in the hand and severing them with the ax, or sometimes digging the earth away about the roots and tearing up the whole bush together.

The alders disposed of, there remained the stumps.
Legare and Esdras attacked the smaller ones with no weapons but their axes and stout wooden Prizes.

They first cut the roots spreading on the surface, then drove a lever well home, and, chests against the bar, threw all their weight upon it.

When their efforts could not break the hundred ties binding the tree to the soil Legare continued to bear heavily that he might raise the stump a little, and while he groaned and grunted under the strain Esdras hewed away furiously level with the ground, severing one by one the remaining roots.
A little distance away the other three men handled the stumping-machine with the aid of Charles Eugene.