THe Lay of the Band 
was far off; but it is coming, and to-night it feels 
near and keen. And to-night there is no loafing about 
the lodge. 
When this house is done, then the rains may de- 
scend, and the floods come, but it will not fall. It is 
built upon a tussock; and a tussock, you will know, 
who have ever grubbed at one, has hold on the bot- 
tom of creation. The winter may descend, and the 
boys, and foxes, come, —and they will come, but not 
before the walls are frozen, — yet the house stands. 
It is boy-proof, almost ; it is entirely rain-, cold-, and 
fox-proof. Many a time I have hacked at its walls 
with my axe when fishing through the ice, but I never 
got in. I have often seen, too, where the fox has gone 
round and round the house in the snow, and where, 
at places, he has attempted to dig into the frozen 
mortar ; but it was a foot thick, as hard as flint, and 
utterly impossible for his pick and shovel. 
Yet strangely enough the house sometimes fails of 
the very purpose for which it was erected. I said the 
floods may come. So they may, ordinarily ; but along 
in March when one comes as a freshet, it rises some- 
times to the dome of the house, filling the single bed- 
chamber and drowning the dwellers out. I remember 
4 
