“My idea was, or is, to stop till I raise money enough to come home and get a farm, which I am able to do in two, three, or four years.” “Alder Point (so called because we’re ‘all dere’), “Sept. 4th. “I have been paid off now about a month. I received fifty-one dollars (a dollar equals 4s. 2d.), and a present of a pair of gum boots, which every one said was low wages. Tom had fifty, and Jackson a hundred and fourteen dollars. We combined these, and bought a fishing boat for ninety dollars, and sail for five more. We then set about to find a land agent; but they are scarce, so we didn’t find one. Then we went down to the sawmills, and bought 2094 feet of assorted lumber. I can’t tell how they measure this lumber; but our house is 24 feet by 16½, with walls 9 feet high, and a roof about 8 feet slope. The lumber cost twenty-eight dollars; hammer, nails, etc., about fifteen dollars. We then chose a spot close to a stream, and built our house. It’s built very well, considering none of us ever built a house before. It is roofed with shingles—i.e., pieces of wood 3 feet by ½ foot, and very thin; they cost seven dollars per 1000. Our house is divided into two rooms—a bedroom, containing a big fireplace and three bunks; and in the other room we grub, etc. At the back of the house we have the sword of Damocles, a tree which has fallen, and rests on its stump, and we know not at what hour he may fall. In the front we have the Siamese twins, a tree about 200 feet high, with another tree, about 100 feet, growing out of him. Nothing but trees all around us, and the nearest house is two miles away.” “The Alder Point Mansion. “I have now shifted my quarters, and am living in my own house, built of rough wood, in the woods on the bank of the river, and free from ornament save ‘Sweet Seventeen’ and ‘The Last Days in Old England,’ which I have framed and hung up. “I am now, to use the words of the poet, ‘head cook and bottle-washer, chief of all the waiters,’ in my own house. It stands in its own grounds—for a simple reason, it couldn’t stand in anybody else’s. It has an elevated appearance,—that is, it looks slightly drunk, for we built it ourselves, and my architectural bump is not very largely developed. Our floor is all of a cant, but Tom settled that difficulty by saying we were to imagine ourselves at sea, and the ship lying over slightly.