Page:Whyte-Melville--Bones and I.djvu/56

 the delight of getting out of your tent, or "booth" as we still call them at our village merry-makings, to sit under anything like a tree or shrub, where, shaded from the sun, you could catch the welcome breath of every breeze that blew? The French officers in the Crimea used to build for themselves trellised out-houses of branches interlaced, swearing volubly the while, and appearing to derive from these bowers no small comfort and refreshment. I can imagine the astonishment of "mon lieutenant" when, on waking in his tent, he should have discovered, like "Jack and the Bean-stalk," that one of these had sprung up for him, unsolicited, in a night. How he would have stared, and shrugged, and gesticulated, and cursed his star with less asperity, and been "exceeding glad of the Gourd!"

They are of many kinds, these excrescences that grow up with such marvellous