In an important recent paper H. E. Scheiblich gave a construction of free inverse semigroups that throws considerable light on their structure [1]. In this note we give an alternative description of free inverse semigroups. What Scheiblich did was to construct a free inverse semigroup as a semigroup of isomorphisms between principal ideals of a semilattice E, say, thus realising free inverse semigroups as inversee subsemigroupss of the semigroup TE, a kind of inverse semigroup introduced and exploited by W. D. Munn [2]. We go instead directly to canonical forms for the elements of a free inverse semigroup. The connexion between our construction and that of Scheiblich's will be clear. There are several alternative procedures possible to reach our construction on which we comment on the way.