A general burst-of laughter followed this demand and ejaculation; and Mat sat up once more in the settle, and examined the place with keener scrutiny.  Nancy herself laughed heartily; and, as she handed him the full glass, entered into an explanation of the circumstances attending his translation.  Mat, at all times rather of pliant disposition, felt rejoiced on finding that he was still compos mentis; and on hearing what took place, he could not help entering into the humor of the enterprise, at which he laughed as heartily as any of them.

“Mat,” said, the farmer, and half a dozen of the neighbors, “you’re a happy man, there’s a hundred of the boys have a school-house half built for you this same blessed sunshiny mornin’, while your lying at aise in your bed.”

“By the sowl of Newton, that invented fluxions!” replied Mat, “but I’ll take revenge for the disgrace you put upon my profession, by stringing up a schoolmaster among you, and I’ll hang you all!  It’s death to steal a four-footed animal; but what do you desarve for stealin’ a Christian baste, a two-legged schoolmaster without feathers, eighteen miles, and he not to know it?”

In the course of a short time Mat was dressed, and having found benefit from the “hair of the dog that bit him,” he tried another glass, which strung his nerves, or, as he himself expressed it—­“they’ve got the rale mathematical tinsion again.”  What the farmer said, however, about the school-house had been true.  Early that morning all the growing and grown young men of Findramore and its “vircinity” had assembled, selected a suitable spot, and, with merry hearts, were then busily engaged in erecting a school-house for their general accomodation.

The manner of building hedge school-houses being rather curious, I will describe it.  The usual spot selected for their erection is a ditch in the road-side; in some situation where there will be as little damp as possible.  From such a spot an excavation is made equal to the size of the building, so that, when this is scooped out, the back side-wall, and the two gables are already formed, the banks being dug perpendicularly.  The front side-wall, with a window in each side of the door, is then built of clay or green sods laid along in rows; the gables are also topped with sods, and, perhaps, a row or two laid upon the back side-wall, if it should be considered too low.  Having got the erection of Mat’s house thus far, they procured a scraw-spade, and repaired with a couple of dozen of cars to the next bog, from which they cut the light heathy surface in strips the length of the roof.  A scraw-spade is an instrument resembling the letter T, with an iron plate at the lower end, considerably bent, and well adapted to the purpose for which it is intended.  Whilst one party cut the scraws, another bound the couples and bauks* and a third cut as many green branches as were sufficient to wattle it.  The couples, being bound, were raised—­the ribs laid on—­then the wattles, and afterwards the scraws.