After the departure of Stairs, I commenced the construction of a corn-bin to store 300 bushels of Indian corn, and to plaster the interior of head-quarters. Jephson busied himself in levelling floor of officers' house. Men carried clay, others rammed and tamped. Some men were on the roofs arranging the large-leaved phrynia one above the other on a kind of trestle frame, others formed ladders, made clay-dough for the walls, doors and windows for the houses, built kitchens, excavated latrines, or dug the ditch--ten feet wide, six feet deep--through a hard yellow clay, that lay under the twenty-four inches of humus and loam of the clearing. When the houses were completed, we made a whitewash out of wood ashes, which gave them a clean and neat appearance. [Illustration: PLAN OF FORT BODO AND VICINITY. _By Lieut. Stairs, R.E._] On the 28th, head-quarters was ready for occupation. We had cleared three acres of land, cut down the bush clean to the distance of 200 yards from the fort, chopped the logs--the lighter were carried away, the heavier were piled up--and fire applied to them, and the next day folded the tents and removed to our mansions, which, as Jephson declared, were "remarkably snug." There was at first a feeling of dampness, but a charcoal fire burning night and day soon baked the walls dry. To February 6 we extended the clearing, but discovering that natives were prowling about the fort, planting poisoned splinters in the paths, cutting down the bananas, and bent on general mischief, half of the garrison were divided into two parties of patrols, to scour the plantations and the adjoining forest. On this day's explorations several camps of dwarfs were found at the distance of a mile from the fort, with stores of plantains in their possession. They were thoroughly rousted out, and their camps were destroyed.