of their proprietors.  I blessed mentally the careless individual who had thus unconsciously provided for our especial shelter; and as the wind had now suddenly arisen sharp from the west, driving the fog before it with clouds of fine drifting snow, I was glad to get under the lee of the providential wall, in the hospitable shelter of which, before two minutes had elapsed, “Stephano, my drunken butler,” was snoring away like a phalanx of bullfrogs, with his head bolstered up somehow between the great moose-horns, and his brawny limbs rolled carelessly in the warm but somewhat unsavory skin of the dead monarch of the forest.  I gloried in his calm repose; for the day was yet young, and I flattered myself that a three-hours’ snooze would restore his muddled intellects to their normal mediocrity of useful instinct, and that I might still achieve my triumphal entry into the city,—­a procession I had been so much in the habit of picturing to myself over the nocturnal camp-fire, that it had become a sort of nightmare with me.  Indeed, I had idealized it roughly in my pocket-book, intending to transfer the sketches, for elaboration on canvas, to Tankerville, the regimental Landseer, whose menagerie of living models, consisting of two bears, one calf-moose, one loup-cervier, three bloated raccoons, and a bald eagle, formed at once the terror and delight of the rising generation of the barracks.

Having got up a small fire with the assistance of the chips and scraps of wood that were plentifully scattered around, I placed my snow-shoes one on top of the other, and sat down on them,—­a sort of preparatory step in my transition to civilization, for they had somewhat the effect of a cane-bottomed chair minus the legs and without a back.  Then I filled my short black pipe from the seal-skin tobacco-pouch, the contents of which had so often assuaged my troubled spirit when I brooded over griefs which then were immature, if not imaginary.  It was a very pleasant smoke, I recollect,—­so pleasant, that I rather congratulated myself upon my position; the only drawback to it being that I was shut out from a view of the town, as the wind and drift rendered it indispensable for comfort in smoking that I should keep strictly to leeward of my bulwark.  Tobacco is notoriously a promoter of reflection; there must be something essentially retrospective in the nature of the weed.  I retired upon the days of my boyhood, my legs and feet becoming clairvoyant of the corduroys and highlows of that happy period of my existence, as the revolving curls of pale smoke exhibited to me, with marvellous fidelity, many quaint successive tableaux of the old familiar scenes of home,—­sentimental, some of them,—­comic, others,—­like the domestic incidents revealed with exaggerations on the hazy field of a magic-lantern.  I thought of my poor mother, and of the excellent parting advice she gave me,—­but more particularly of the night-caps with strings, which she extracted such a