slowly up from Green Bay.

A dinner had been prepared for us. This is one of the advantages of the
zigzag approach by the Fox River--travellers never take their friends by
surprise; and when the whole circle sat down to the hospitable board, we
were indeed a merry company.

After dinner Mrs. Twiggs showed me the quarters assigned to us, on the
opposite side of the spacious hall. They consisted of two large rooms on
each of the three floors or stories of the building. On the ground-floor
the front room was vacant. The one in the rear was to be the
sleeping-apartment, as was evident from a huge, unwieldy bedstead, of
proportions amply sufficient to have accommodated Og, the King of
Bashan, with Mrs. Og and the children into the bargain. We could not
repress our laughter; but the bedstead was nothing to another structure
which occupied a second corner of the apartment.

This edifice had been built under the immediate superintendence of one
of our young lieutenants, and it was plain to be seen that upon it both
he and the soldiers who fabricated it had exhausted all their
architectural skill. The timbers of which it was composed had been
grooved and carved; the pillars that supported the front swelled in and
out in a most fanciful manner; the doors were not only panelled, but
radiated in a way to excite the admiration of all unsophisticated eyes.
A similar piece of workmanship had been erected in each set of quarters,
to supply the deficiency of closets, an inconvenience which had never
occurred, until too late, to the bachelors who planned them. The three
apartments of which each structure was composed, were unquestionably
designed for clothes-press, store-room, and china-closet; such, at
least, were the uses to which Mrs. Twiggs had appropriated the one