Our quarters were spacious, but having been constructed of the green trees of the forest, cut down and sawed into boards by the bands of the soldiers, they were considerably given to shrinking and warping, thus leaving many a yawning crevice.  Stuffing the cracks with cotton batting, and pasting strips of paper over them, formed the employment of many a leisure hour.

Then the chimneys, spite of all the currents of air, which might have been expected to create a draught, had a sad habit of smoking.  To remedy this, a couple of gun-barrels were, by order of the commanding officer, sawed off and inserted in the hearth, one on each side of the fire-place, in the hope that the air from the room below might help to carry the smoke into its proper place, the chimney.

The next morning after this had been done, Louisa was washing the hearth.

“Pray, ma’am,” said she, “what are these things put in here for?”

I explained their use.

“Oh, I am so glad it is only that!  Uncle Ephraim (Major Twiggs’s servant) said they were to be filled with powder and fired off Christmas Day, and he was terribly afraid they would blow the house up, and we in it.”

Ephraim, who was a most faithful and valuable servant, often amused himself with playing upon the credulity of the younger portions of the colored fraternity.

“Is it true,” asked Louisa, one day, “that Pillon and Plante were once prairie-wolves?”

“Prairie-wolves! what an idea!  Why do you ask such a foolish question?”

“Because Uncle Ephraim says they, and all the Frenchmen about here, were once prairie-wolves, and that, living so near the white people, they grow, after a time, to be like them, and learn to talk and dress like them.  And then, when they get to be old, they turn back into prairie-wolves again, and that all the wolves that the officers bait with their dogs used to be Frenchmen, once.”

After a time, however, I ceased to straighten out these stories of Uncle Ephraim, for I was gradually arriving at the conviction that my little colored damsel was by no means so simple and unsophisticated as she would have me believe, and that I was, after all, the one who was imposed upon.

The snow this winter was prodigious, and the cold intense.  The water would freeze in our parlors at a very short distance from the fire, for, although the “fatigue-parties” kept the halls filled with wood, almost up to the ceiling, that did not counterbalance the inconvenience of having the wide doors thrown open to the outer air for a great portion of the day, to allow of their bringing it in.  We Northerners should have had wood-houses specially for the purpose, and not only have kept our great hall-doors closed, but have likewise protected them with a “hurricane-house.”  But the Florida frontier was not a climate in which our Southern bachelors could have acquired the knowledge available when the thermometer was twenty-five degrees below zero—­a point at which brandy congealed in the sideboard.