YULE-TIME. 127 



remarkably well. But Charlie was more than a tailor ; 

 and in fact, it was a very small portion of his time 

 that he devoted to tailoring. He was by turns a 

 boatman, a pilot, a fisherman in a desultory and erratic 

 sort of way, a fish-curer, a ploughman, a carpenter, a 

 barber, a bird-stuffer. At one time he would be 

 shooting rabbits or hunting them with a collie by 

 moonlight ; at another, taming wild ponies ; at another, 

 breaking oxen to the yoke ; at another, away with " the 

 Mester " seal-hunting ; at another, accompanying some 

 traveller from the South on his rounds with a pack of 

 merchandise or patterns. A veritable Jack-of-all- 

 trades was Charlie ; but an honest, faithful, trustworthy 

 soul, and a great ally of ours. I don't know how we 

 should have got on without Charlie. He was full of 

 shifts and ingenuity, a man of infinite resources, and 

 withal obliging and cheerful. He had, however, a 

 notion that he was not robust, and that continuous 

 application at his trade was injurious to his health — 

 an exceedingly preposterous idea, and falsified by the 

 fact that he lived to be a hale old fellow of nearly 

 ninety ; but it was a convenient excuse for off-putting. 

 We therefore found it no easy matter to get a job out 

 of his hands. A month or more before Yule, the 

 materials would be conveyed to him, with many 

 injunctions to set to work at once, and in earnest — a 

 thing he never did. Every two or three days a visit 

 would be paid, to see how he was getting on: but 

 progress was provokingly slow. He never thought of 

 serious work until a week before Yule, and then he 



