id of appearing tedious in describing our many mistakes,
our frequent mishaps, and the many blundering contrivances we had.
Certain it is that to the clerk of the works we owed most of our
neatness, to the quick wits of the girls many of our ideas, and one and
all worked with a will. Nevertheless, I have no doubt that the commonest
carpenter in the smallest village would have laughed at the house we
built, and how we rectified gaps with grass and moss, how things warped
one way and others shrunk the contrary, how nails stuck out their points
and their heads were utterly lost, how screws were such a time before
they would ever screw for us, how, animated by the clerk of the works,
few thought of chopped fingers and hammered hands, how others ceased to
shriek at the monstrous spiders, centipedes, lizards and small snakes,
appearing every minute in the grass and moss; and now one and all
agreed, that, in spite of every impediment, we should have the
housewarming dinner and the first usage of our new mansion on the first
Christmas-day we had ever spent on this unknown but lonely island.

CHAPTER XXII.

And so it was quite ready, and with what pride and satisfaction we
viewed it. We took little private excursions around it; we made
innumerable drives into it; we gave it affectionate little pattings, as
if it was a child; we smoothed down little inequalities; we utterly
denied the existence of a smell of paint, an idea hazarded by Madame.
Schillie had a doubt it was rather on one side, which doubt was driven
to the winds. Sybil suggested a wish that it had been made higher, for
which she was scouted by the older ones, and nearly tickled to death by
the younger ones. Not even the remembrance of our home put us out of
conceit of our new, but certainly most clumsy mansion. Oh home! That
lovely home? Are we to see it again, or is it only to be seen in a dream
of the past; and our kith and kin, our kind good neighbours, all that we
loved so much, were we to see them no more? But this was Christmas-day.

The young ones had swept and decorated our church, as well as they could
in imitation of the churches at home. Certainly nothing could be more
gorgeous than the long trailing creepers that hung suspended all round,
some with scarlet flowers, some bright blue, the magnificent hibiscus,
the beautiful bell-shaped datura, with innumerable others, to which we
could give no names.

This was to be a complete holiday. We dressed