him up a stretcher bed, the most comfortable of things, canvas
stretched on to a wooden frame, with a mattress on the top. You
could not wish for anything softer. He was one of our ocean
companions; his nickname of Mike still sticks to him. On getting
to Winnipeg at night he had great difficulty in finding our
whereabouts; even at the Club he was told the only W---- known
kept a store in Main Street. Luckily from the Club he went to
A----'s livery stable, which is exactly behind it, where a man
offered to drive him out forthwith, having driven another man here
only four days ago; but he preferred waiting till the morning,
getting here somewhere about 9 o'clock, when he was set down
immediately to work to stone the raisins for a plum cake, and when
tired of that had to help A---- planting potatoes. He declares he
never will come here with his best clothes and a "boiled" shirt on
again, as we have worked him so hard.

The accounts he gives, in an exaggerated Irish brogue, of his
experiences in Minnesota have kept us in fits of laughter. The
description of their first drive, when both he and his companions
were all bogged; and how that twenty-seven mules and twenty-eight
horses bought at St. Louis all arrived one night at the station
about 5 o'clock, after sixty hours' travelling with no food or
water, had to be unloaded from the cars, and they hadn't a halter
or even a rope to do it with. Eventually they got all the poor
beasts into a yard with wooden pailing round, but, something
startling them, they made a rush, the fence gave way, for which
damage the proprietor charged them ten pounds, and all galloped
straight on to the prairie, and it took the men all night getting
them together again. One pair of horses disappeared altogether;
but were brought back when a reward of thirty dollars was offered;