it was cold at night--of scaring away wild beasts, and
of cooking their supper. These fires he fed at intervals during the
whole night with huge logs, and the way in which he made the sparks fly
up in among the strange big leaves of the tropical trees and parasitical
plants overhead, was quite equal, if not superior, to a display of
regular fireworks.

Then Bumble and Glynn built a little platform of logs, on which they
strewed leaves and grass, and over which they spread a curtain or canopy
of broad leaves and boughs. This was Ailie's couch. It stood in the
full blaze of the centre fire, and commanded a view of all that was
going on in every part of the little camp; and when Ailie lay down on it
after a good supper, and was covered up with a blanket, and further
covered over with a sort of gauze netting to protect her from the
mosquitoes, which were very numerous--when all this was done, we say,
and when, in addition to this, she lay and witnessed the jovial laughter
and enjoyment of His Majesty King Bumble, as he sat at the big fire
smoking his pipe, and the supreme happiness of Phil Briant, and the
placid joy of Tim Rokens, and the exuberant delight of Glynn, and the
semi-scientific enjoyment of Dr Hopley as he examined a collection of
rare plants; and the quiet comfort of the trader, and the awkward,
shambling, loose-jointed pleasure of long Jim Scroggles; and the beaming
felicity of her own dear father; who sat not far from her, and turned
occasionally in the midst of the conversation to give her a nod--she
felt in her heart that then and there she had fairly reached the very
happiest moment in all her life.

Ailie gazed in dreamy delight until she suddenly and unaccountably saw
at least six fires, and fully half-a-dozen Bumbles, and eight or nine
Glynns, and no end of fathers, and thousands of trees, and millions of
sparks, all jumbled together in one vast complicated and magnificent
pyrotechnic display; and then she fell asleep.

It is a curious fact, and one for which it is not easy to account, that
however happy you may be when you go to sleep out in the wild woods, you
invariably awake in the morning in possession of a very small amount of
happiness indeed. Probably it is because one in such circumstances is
usually called upon to turn out before he has had enough sleep; perhaps
it may be that the fires have burnt low or gone out altogether, and the
gloom of a forest before sunrise is not calculated to