“From this woman, so strangely compounded, I learned that she had suffered so much privation last winter, that she had made up her mind not to stay in the bush another such a season. ‘At the first fall of snow I’ll go to the workhouse, that I will!’ she said in the tone of one who says that in such an event he is determined to cut his throat. ‘Why, would you belave it, sir?—last winter the snow would be up as high as our little house, and we had to cut a path through it to the min, or we’d been ruined intirely.’ “. . . Presently the report of a gun was heard. ‘Gunfire!’ cried my companion. ‘They’ll be back soon now, and I hope it’s not drunk they are.’ I went out to listen. All was dead quiet, and nothing was to be seen but the lights in the various bushes, till suddenly a blaze broke out at a distance. Some dry furze had been fired by some of the soldiers wandering on the common, and in search of whom the picket presently came round, peeping into every bush. Presently the sound of distant voices was heard; it came nearer and nearer, and its shrillness and confusion made it known to me that it was indeed a party of returning wrens, far from sober. They were, in fact, mad drunk; and the sound of their voices as they came on through the dense darkness, screaming obscene sounds broken by bursts of horrible laughter, with now and then a rattling volley of oaths which told that fighting was going on, was staggering. I confess I now felt uncomfortable. I had only seen the wren sober, or getting sober; what she might be in that raging state of drunkenness I had yet to find out, and the discovery threatened to be very unpleasant. The noise came nearer, and was more shocking because you could disentangle the voices and track each through its own course of swearing, or of obscene singing and shouting, or of dreadful threats, which dealt in detail with every part of the human frame. ‘Is this your lot?’ I asked my companion with some apprehension, as at length the shameful crew burst out of the darkness. ‘Some of ’em, I think.’ But no, they passed on; such a spectacle as made me tremble. I felt like a man respited when the last woman went staggering by. Again voices were heard, this time proceeding from the women belonging to the bush where I was spending such an uncomfortable evening. Five in all,—two tipsy and three comparatively sober,—they soon presented themselves at the door; one of them was Billy’s mother. At the sound of her voice the child woke up and cried for her. She was the most forbidding-looking creature in the whole place; but she hastened to divest herself outside of her crinoline and the rest of her walking attire (nearly all she had on), and came in and nursed the boy very tenderly. The other wrens also took off gown and petticoat, and folding them up, made seats of them within the nest. Then came the important inquiry from the watching wren, ‘What luck have you