TENTS VERSUS HUTS.

Dominion, Volume 8, Issue 2540, 14 August 1915, Page 3

TENTS VERSUS HUTS.

Sir.—i's the question of tents versus huts is at present interesting the) public, perhaps a few remarks on the subject might find a place—with your usual courtesy—in your valuable columns. I have spent' over thirty years under oanvas in New Zealand, in the mountains and lowlands of both islands. On one occasion in winter time, having to pitch camp near a sawmill, I thought a weather-boarded iron-roofed hut would be more comfortable. But I found it the most miserable place I ever lived in, cold and draiughty, though I had a stove in it. ■Of course if the -hut had been, lined roof >aiid sides,'with seasoned l timber for a floor, things would have:'been! all right. But if the question is tait , versus r hut, give me thorignji/eir^ry-' set up and pitched, of course. As soon as a tent is pegged to the ground, before the side-lines are made fast, a ditch twelve or eighteen inohes deep should be due round it with an outlet to a soakhole. The nature of the ground on which one is oarnped should be guide. I have camped on a ground where, after every heavy Tain, I have had to dig a hole in the tent floor arid; bail it out regularly. As for being flooded out, this was not an unusual occurrence.

I have turned in with things normal, but on hearing a peculiar tapping sound in the night have struck a lightj found it to be my boots floating about, and knooking against the small posts which formed my table legs. As for shifting a camp after floods went down, this I never did. Where one camped was generally the handiest place for your work around, and you took the. rough with the smooth. Ais for being siok and sorry, I never had a. doctor, either to myself or my men, all my oamping days, and as for hardships, the above is only one of many.—l am, etc.,, W. D. B. MURRAY. [Owing to the exigencies of space this letter has been condensed.—Editor, Dominion.]