ing a little. "Rain
and sleet before morning, likely as not."

We set about preparing for it. A little back from the fire a wall of
rough stones was hastily thrown up to the height of three feet or
over, and continued for ten or twelve feet, with both ends brought
round toward the fire. We then got the boat up out of the water, and,
by hard lifting, raised it bottom-up, and laid it on our semicircular
wall. It thus formed a kind of shed large enough to creep under. But,
not satisfied with this, Donovan fell to work with his butcher-knife,
and, in the course of an hour, had cleaved the skin off both sides of
the walrus down to where it rested on the rock. Then, using the hafts
of the oars as levers, we rolled the carcass on one side. The hide was
then skinned off underneath; when, on rolling the carcass clean over,
we had the hide off in one broad, immensely-heavy sheet. Raed
estimated it to contain twenty square yards, reckoning the average
girth of the walrus at twelve feet, and its length at fifteen feet. By
means of the oars and thwarts as supports, the skin was then raised
with the raw side up in tent form over the wall and boat, making
shelter sufficient for us all to get under with comfort.

"Now let it storm, if it wants to!" cried Weymouth: "we've got a
water-proof seal-skin at least!"

An arch of stones, with our spider set in the top, was then built over
the fire to protect it from the weather.

"How long will this walrus last for firewood, suppose?" I asked.

"Oh! two or three days, for a guess," Donovan thought.

"After that, what?" said Wade.

"It's no use to trouble ourselves about that now," said Kit: "the
Bible expressly forbids it. Besides, we've had trouble enough for one
day. I'm for turning in and having a nap."

"Not much fun in turning in on a bare ledge, I fancy," Wade replied.
"We shall miss our mattresses."

"A bare rock is a rather hard thing to bunk on, I do think," Raed
remarked, peeping under the walrus-skin. "If we were in Maine, now, we
should qualify that with a 'shake-down' of spruce-boughs. Didn't see
any thing of the evergreen sort among the rocks, did you, Wash?"

We had not. It then occurred to me that we had observed several little
shrubs common to the mountains of Labrador, and known to naturalists
as the Labrador tea-plant.

"Any thing is better than the bare rock," Raed remarked, when I spoke
of this shrub; and we all sallied out to glean an armful.

While thus eng