[Illustration: AN IMPROVED MISSION HOUSE AT EFULEN. _The first house was similar but much smaller._] The changes of temperature at Efulen being very sudden, and immediately felt within the thin walls of our house, we had need of fire, and we made a fireplace by a simple device for which we claimed joint credit. We cut a hole in the floor and built the ground up from below to the level of the floor. There was no chimney, not even a hole for the smoke to escape; but it got out easily enough through the opening (the width of the rafters) between the walls and the roof. Usually we found it very pleasant to sit around a good fire in such a fireplace, and the smoke troubled us but very little. Often however by reason of some sudden change of wind, or passing whirlwind, the smoke was seized with panic and spread in a black cloud through the room, so enveloping us and suffocating our senses that the fire itself was wholly inferential, on the principle that where there was so much smoke there must be some fire. Many a thought of siderial sublimity, in the moment of its utterance, was thus strangled in a mouthful of smoke and ashes. The whole house was twenty-four feet long and sixteen feet wide. There were five rooms in all. The partitions were of bark and did not reach to the roof but were eight feet high. We had greatly improved our furniture. Those who admire _mission_ furniture ought to have seen ours. Instead of the first table, which was a solid piece of log turned on end, Dr. Good and I sawed a cut six inches wide out of that same log, and Mr. Kerr put rustic legs into it. The chairs were made exactly the same way but cut from smaller logs. In such a house, seated upon such chairs and around such a table we sat each evening after supper, indulging in a social hour. And while the votaries of the _simple life_ in the far-away homeland were absorbed in the discussion of such questions as How to Avoid Luxuries, the subject of our discussion was frequently How to Obtain Comforts. We were not always idle as we talked; for the evening brought its own duties, often of a strictly domestic nature Sometimes, as we sat around the table, Dr. Good was engaged in darning his socks, Mr. Kerr was mending his shoes, while in a state of despair I was trying to put a neat patch on a pair of trousers.