king our meals. The Saint says he has invited them to
breakfast with us, on the first of April next, by which time he expects
that the chinks will have gaped wide enough to permit of the passage of
cattle.

Of course, the smoke of the fire will not go up the chimney as it ought,
but floats freely about the shanty. This is good for the bacon and hams,
when there are any, that depend from the rafters. It is also a wholesome
thing, says Old Colonial, and sweetens and preserves everything. "None
of your gassy, sooty coal-smoke, but the fragrant vapours of the burning
forest!" so he remarked one night, when we were all blinded and choked
by the volumes of smoke that rolled through the shanty. O'Gaygun is
often funny, but not always original. He says that the smoke floats
about our habitation because it never knows which hole it ought to go
out at!

On rainy nights--and that is nearly every night during some three months
of the year--there is perpetual misery in the shanty. One hears some
choice varieties of rhetorical flowers of speech; there is a continual
shifting about of beds; and often unseemly scuffling for drier places.
O'Gaygun says that he loves to "astthronomise" when lying comfortably in
bed; but he adds, that, "a shower-bath is a quare place to sleep in."

It will be surmised from this that our roof is leaky. All roofs are
that, you know, in a greater or lesser degree, only ours in a greater,
perhaps. Those shingles _will_ come off. We are sure we put them on
properly and securely. The nails must have been some inferior rotten
quality, doubtless. Loose shingles lie about all around the shanty. They
come in useful as plates, as our crockery is generally short. In fact,
O'Gaygun prefers them to the usual article, and always goes outside to
pick up a plate for any stranger who may happen to drop in to lunch. To
use his words, "They fall aff the shanty roof loike the laves aff the
tthrees!"

Somehow or other all these things go unremedied. It would, of course, be
an admission that our work had been unsatisfactory, if we were to
earnestly set about repairing the shanty, and thereby formally allow
that it required such renovation. No one will dare to initiate such a
serious thing. Besides, it is no one man's particular business to begin
the work of mending; while we are always busy, and have acquired such an
amazing notion of the value of our time, that we consider the necessary
repairs would not be worth the time