scribed with
graphic power a monster before whose bristling horrors the great
sea-serpent himself would hide his diminished head, and went into
particulars so minute and complex that his comrades set him down as "one
o' the biggest liars" that ever lived, until he explained that the
monster in question had only appeared to him "wance in wan of his owld
grandmother's dreams!"

In fishing, and hunting with bows and arrows made by themselves, as well
as with ingenious traps and weirs and snares of their own invention, the
crew spent their time pleasantly, and the summer passed rapidly away.
During this period the rude tents of spars and sailcloth were supplanted
by ruder huts of round logs, caulked with hay and plastered with mud.
Holes in the walls thereof did service as windows during the day, and
bits of old sails or bundles of hay stuffed into them formed shutters at
night. Sheds were also put up to guard provisions and stores from the
weather, and stages were erected on which to dry the cod-fish after
being split and cleaned; so that our shipwrecked crew, in their new
home, which they named Wagtail Bay, had thus unwittingly begun that
great industry for which Newfoundland has since become celebrated all
the world over.

It is not to be supposed that among such men in such circumstances
everything went harmoniously. At first, indeed, what with having plenty
to do in fishing, hunting, building, splitting and drying fish,
etcetera, all day, and being pretty well tired out at nights, the peace
was kept pretty easily; all the more that Big Swinton had been quelled
and apparently quite subdued. But as the stores became full of food and
the days shortened, while the nights proportionately lengthened, time
began to hang heavy on their hands, and gradually the camp became
resolved into the two classes which are to be found everywhere--the
energetically industrious and the lazily idle. Perhaps we should say
that those two extreme phases of human nature began to show themselves,
for between them there existed all shades and degrees, so that it was
difficult to tell, in some cases, to which class the men belonged.

The proverbial mischief, of course, was soon found, for the latter class
to do, and Grummidge began to discover that the ruling of his subjects,
which sat lightly enough on his shoulders during the summer, became a
matter of some trouble and anxiety in autumn. He also found, somewhat
to his surprise, that legis