Page:An Australian Parsonage.djvu/85

 only keep the paper from falling forwards by nailing a strip of tape tightly along the edge close under the ceiling. The ceilings, when there are any to these mud houses, are made of strong unbleached calico, and, on account of the ventilation that it admits, a calico ceiling is much pleasanter than one of plaster in a warm climate. On rough nights, however, the wind that finds its way beneath the rafters keeps drawing up and down the cotton ceiling in sudden gusts, and if the fastenings of your canopy are not very artfully contrived, one end or other of it is sure to give way after a time, and hang dependent in a melancholy manner. Our sitting and sleeping rooms were all ceiled with calico, but the kitchen was open up to the thatched rafters, and, by way of compensation for the undraped condition of these, both rafters and thatch were festooned with hanging nests of puddled clay, looking somewhat as if they belonged to a colony of swallows. The proprietors, however, were not birds, but of the race of mason-hornet, properly called a sphex; and as they had a fancy for building their nests exactly over our heads, it was well for us that only one of the clay tenements ever fell down, which it did one day with a sounding crash upon an empty tray upon the kitchen table.

After glancing my eyes around me for a few moments after my arrival, I should have been truly glad if some one had had the forethought to light the kitchen fire, and provide a kettle of hot water for tea; but on looking at the hearth I saw that all was as bare as Mother Hubbard's cupboard, and when I turned quickly to an old man in charge of the house, who was wandering about in his shirt sleeves, and asked "Where's the firewood?"