I had left the V hut warm and comfortable,and on my return found it very different.I fear we had not put enough thatch upon it,and the ten days'rain had proved too much for it.It was now neither air-tight nor water-tight;the floor,or rather the ground,was soaked and soppy with mud;the nice warm snow-grass on which I had lain so comfortably the night before I left,was muddy and wet;altogether,there being no fire inside,the place was as revolting-looking an affair as one would wish to see:coming wet and cold off a journey,we had hoped for better things.There was nothing for it but to make the best of it,so we had tea,and fried some of the beef--the smell of which was anything but agreeable,for it had been lying ten days on the ground on the other side the Rangitata,and was,to say the least,somewhat high--and then we sat in our great-coats on four stones round the fire,and smoked;then I baked,and one of the cadets washed up;and then we arranged our blankets as best we could,and were soon asleep,alike unconscious of the dripping rain,which came through the roof of the hut,and of the cold,raw atmosphere which was insinuating itself through the numerous crevices of the thatch.
I had brought up a tin kettle with me.This was a great comfort and acquisition,for before we had nothing larger than pint pannikins to fetch up water in from the creek;this was all very well by daylight,but in the dark the hundred yards from the hut to the creek were no easy travelling with a pannikin in each hand.The ground was very stony,and covered with burnt Irishman scrub,against which (the Irishman being black and charred,and consequently invisible in the dark)I was continually stumbling and spilling half the water.There was a terrace,too,so that we seldom arrived with much more than half a pannikin,and the kettle was an immense step in advance.The Irishman called it very "beneficial,"as he called everything that pleased him.He was a great character:he used to "destroy"his food,not eat it.If I asked him to have any more bread or meat,he would say,with perfect seriousness,that he had "destroyed enough this time."He had many other quaint expressions of this sort,but they did not serve to make the hut water-tight,and I was half regretfully obliged to send him away a short time afterwards.