wung
to--the frame easing just a little in another direction. I suppose
it would take Edison to invent a thing like that, that came about by
accident. The different strengths and directions of the gusts of wind
must have accounted for the variations of the door's movements--and
maybe the draught of our big fire had helped.

Dave scratched his head a good bit.

'I never lived in a house yet,' he said, as we came away--'I never lived
in a house yet without there was something wrong with it. Gimme a good
tent.'

A Wild Irishman.

About seven years ago I drifted from Out-Back in Australia to
Wellington, the capital of New Zealand, and up country to a little town
called Pahiatua, which meaneth the 'home of the gods', and is situated
in the Wairarappa (rippling or sparkling water) district. They have a
pretty little legend to the effect that the name of the district was not
originally suggested by its rivers, streams, and lakes, but by the
tears alleged to have been noticed, by a dusky squire, in the eyes of
a warrior chief who was looking his first, or last--I don't remember
which--upon the scene. He was the discoverer, I suppose, now I come to
think of it, else the place would have been already named. Maybe the
scene reminded the old cannibal of the home of his childhood.

Pahiatua was not the home of my god; and it rained for five weeks.
While waiting for a remittance, from an Australian newspaper--which, I
anxiously hoped, would arrive in time for enough of it to be left (after
paying board) to take me away somewhere--I spent many hours in the
little shop of a shoemaker who had been a digger; and he told me yarns
of the old days on the West Coast of Middle Island. And, ever and anon,
he returned to one, a hard-case from the West Coast, called 'The Flour
of Wheat', and his cousin, and his mate, Dinny Murphy, dead. And ever
and again the shoemaker (he was large, humorous, and good-natured) made
me promise that, when I dropped across an old West Coast digger--no
matter who or what he was, or whether he was drunk or sober--I'd ask him
if he knew the 'Flour of Wheat', and hear what he had to say.

I make no attempt to give any one shade of the Irish brogue--it can't be
done in writing.

'There's the little red Irishman,' said the shoemaker, who was Irish
himself, 'who always wants to fight when he has a glass in him; and
there's the big sarcastic dark Irishman who makes more trouble and
fights at a spree tha