“Temper!” he cried, “I don’t believe there’s a good-tempered person in the world.  It’s all hypocrisy!  I never had a good-temper!  My mother was an ill-tempered woman, and ruled my father, who was a confoundedly severe, domineering man.  I was born in an ill-temper.  I was an ill-tempered child; I grew up an ill-tempered man.  I feel worse than ill-tempered now, and when I die it will be in an ill-temper.”

“Well,” quoth I, “Moodie has made you a tumbler of hot punch, which may help to drive out the cold and the ill-temper, and cure the rheumatism.”

“Ay; your husband’s a good fellow, and worth two of you, Mrs. Moodie.  He makes some allowance for the weakness of human nature, and can excuse even my ill-temper.”

I did not choose to bandy words with him, and the next day the unfortunate creature was shaking with the ague.  A more intractable, outrageous, Im-patient I never had the ill-fortune to nurse.  During the cold fit, he did nothing but swear at the cold, and wished himself roasting; and during the fever, he swore at the heat, and wished that he was sitting, in no other garment than his shirt, on the north side of an iceberg.  And when the fit at last left him, he got up, and ate such quantities of fat pork, and drank so much whiskey-punch, that you would have imagined he had just arrived from a long journey, and had not tasted food for a couple of days.

He would not believe that fishing in the cold night-air upon the water had made him ill, but raved that it was all my fault for having laid my baby down on his bed while it was shaking with the ague.

Yet, if there were the least tenderness mixed up in his iron nature, it was the affection he displayed for that young child.  Dunbar was just twenty months old, with bright, dark eyes, dimpled cheeks, and soft, flowing, golden hair, which fell round his infant face in rich curls.  The merry, confiding little creature formed such a contrast to his own surly, unyielding temper, that, perhaps, that very circumstance made the bond of union between them.  When in the house, the little boy was seldom out of his arms, and whatever were Malcolm’s faults, he had none in the eyes of the child, who used to cling around his neck, and kiss his rough, unshaven cheeks with the greatest fondness.

“If I could afford it, Moodie,” he said one day to my husband, “I should like to marry.  I want some one upon whom I could vent my affections.”  And wanting that some one in the form of woman, he contented himself with venting them upon the child.

As the spring advanced, and after Jacob left us, he seemed ashamed of sitting in the house doing nothing, and therefore undertook to make us a garden, or “to make garden,” as the Canadians term preparing a few vegetables for the season.  I procured the necessary seeds, and watched with no small surprise the industry with which our strange visitor commenced operations.  He repaired the broken fence, dug the ground with the greatest care, and laid it out with a skill and neatness of which I had believed him perfectly incapable.  In less than three weeks, the whole plot presented a very pleasing prospect, and he was really elated by his success.