d padding always about
with him; he was, therefore, a little apt to sneer at the attempts of
his brethren to render the ill-shaped, wooden-bottomed chairs, with
which the hall was ornamented, bearable.

"Well, doctor," said the skipper, "I cannot see how you make me out
lazy. Surely it is not an evidence of laziness my endeavouring to
render these instruments of torture less tormenting? Seeking to be
comfortable, if it does not inconvenience any one else, is not laziness.
Why, what _is_ comfort?" The skipper began to wax philosophical at
this point, and took the pipe from his mouth as he gravely propounded
the momentous question. "What _is_ comfort? If I go out to camp in the
woods, and after turning in find a sharp stump sticking into my ribs on
one side, and a pine root driving in the small of my back on the other
side, is _that_ comfort? Certainly not. And if I get up, seize a
hatchet, level the stump, cut away the root, and spread pine brush over
the place, am I to be called lazy for doing so? Or if I sit down on a
chair, and on trying to lean back to rest myself find that the stupid
lubber who made it has so constructed it that four small hard points
alone touch my person--two being at the hip-joints and two at the
shoulder-blades; and if to relieve such physical agony I jump up and
clap a pillow at my back, am I to be called lazy for doing _that_?"

"What a glorious entry that would make in the log!" said the doctor, in
a low tone, soliloquisingly, as if he made the remark merely for his own
satisfaction, while he tapped the ashes out of his pipe.

The skipper looked as if he meditated a sharp reply; but his intentions,
whatever they might have been, were interrupted by the opening of the
door, and the entrance of the accountant, bearing under his arm a packet
of letters.

A general rush was made upon him, and in a few minutes a dead silence
reigned in the hall, broken only at intervals by an exclamation of
surprise or pathos, as the inmates, in the retirement of their separate
apartments, perused letters from friends in the interior of the country
and friends at home: letters that were old--some of them bearing dates
many months back--and travel-stained, but new and fresh and cheering,
nevertheless, to their owners, as the clear, bright sun in winter or the
verdant leaves in spring.

Harry Somerville's letters were numerous and long. He had several from
friends in Red River, besides one or two from