r there was a cook stove, rusted and broken. In the other a
bed made of unplaned planks and poles. It was fully eight feet long, and
upon it was a heap of dark bed clothing. There was a chair and a bench
of colossal proportions. There was an ordinary kitchen cupboard with
a few cracked dirty dishes in it, and beside it on a tall box a tin
washbasin. Under the bed was a pile of pint flasks, some broken,
some whole, all empty. On the wood box lay a pair of shoes of almost
incredible dimensions. On the wall hung a saddle, a gun, and some ragged
clothing, conspicuous among which was a suit of dark cloth, apparently
new, with a paper collar carefully wrapped in a red silk handkerchief
and pinned to the sleeve. Over the door hung a wolf and a badger skin,
and on the door itself a brace of thirty or forty snake skins whose
noisy tails rattled ominously every time it opened. The strangest things
in the shanty were the wide windowsills. At first glance they looked as
though they had been ruthlessly hacked and mutilated with a hatchet, but
on closer inspection all the notches and holes in the wood took form and
shape. There seemed to be a series of pictures. They were, in a rough
way, artistic, but the figures were heavy and labored, as though they
had been cut very slowly and with very awkward instruments. There were
men plowing with little horned imps sitting on their shoulders and on
their horses' heads. There were men praying with a skull hanging over
their heads and little demons behind them mocking their attitudes. There
were men fighting with big serpents, and skeletons dancing together. All
about these pictures were blooming vines and foliage such as never grew
in this world, and coiled among the branches of the vines there was
always the scaly body of a serpent, and behind every flower there was
a serpent's head. It was a veritable Dance of Death by one who had felt
its sting. In the wood box lay some boards, and every inch of them
was cut up in the same manner. Sometimes the work was very rude and
careless, and looked as though the hand of the workman had trembled. It
would sometimes have been hard to distinguish the men from their evil
geniuses but for one fact, the men were always grave and were either
toiling or praying, while the devils were always smiling and dancing.
Several of these boards had been split for kindling and it was evident
that the artist did not value his work highly.

It was the first day of winter