In spite of the fast-falling rain, Fitz-Adams, the boss, ordered us up at half-past four, as usual, this morning; but when breakfast was over, the rain was too heavy to admit of our going to work. Some of the woodsmen are gone back to bed, and some are mending their clothes in the loft, and the rest of the gang are loafing in the "lobby," smoking, and playing what they call "High, low, Jack and the game," except Mike, a superb young Irishman, who, seated on a bench, with his back braced against the window-sill, is reading a worn paper copy of one of the Duchess's novels, which is the only book that I have so far seen in the camp. Jennie, the head-cook and housekeeper, has given me leave to write at one of the long tables where the gang is fed. It is a relief sometimes to get away from the men. There may be _ennui_ that is more soul-destroying, but I have never known any that caused such evidently acute suffering as the form which seizes upon workingmen of my class in hours of enforced idleness. When the day's work is done, they take their rest as a matter of course, and enjoy it. But a day like this, which lays them off from work, and shuts them within doors, furnishes awful evidence of the poverty of their lives. Most of the men here can read, but not to one of them is reading a resource. The men at play are in blasphemous ill-temper over the cards, and are, apparently, on the brink of blows, while Mike is laboriously spelling his way through a page, and nervously squirming in an effort to find a comfortable seat. And I know, from the experience of Sundays, in what humor the men will come down to dinner from the loft, to face an afternoon of eternal length to them, which, in some way, must be lived through.