with
many large apartments. The walls were well clayed between the logs, which
were large and round, except on the upper and under sides, and as visible
inside as out, successive bulging cheeks gradually lessening upwards and
tuned to each other with the axe, like Pandean pipes. Probably the musical
forest-gods had not yet cast them aside; they never do till they are split
or the bark is gone. It was a style of architecture not described by
Vitruvius, I suspect, though possibly hinted at in the biography of
Orpheus; none of your frilled or fluted columns, which have cut such a
false swell, and support nothing but a gable end and their builder's
pretensions,--that is, with the multitude; and as for "ornamentation," one
of those words with a dead tail which architects very properly use to
describe their flourishes, there were the lichens and mosses and fringes
of bark, which nobody troubled himself about. We certainly leave the
handsomest paint and clapboards behind in the woods, when we strip off the
bark and poison ourselves with white-lead in the towns. We get but half
the spoils of the forest. For beauty, give me trees with the fur on. This
house was designed and constructed with the freedom of stroke of a
forester's axe, without other compass and square than Nature uses.
Wherever the logs were cut off by a window or door, that is, were not kept
in place by alternate overlapping, they were held one upon another by very
large pins driven in diagonally on each side, where branches might have
been, and then cut off so close up and down as not to project beyond the
bulge of the log, as if the logs clasped each other in their arms. These
logs were posts, studs, boards, clapboards, laths, plaster, and nails, all
in one. Where the citizen uses a mere sliver or board, the pioneer uses
the whole trunk of a tree. The house had large stone chimneys, and was
roofed with spruce-bark. The windows were imported, all but the casings.
One end was a regular logger's camp, for the boarders, with the usual fir
floor and log benches. Thus this house was but a slight departure from the
hollow tree, which the bear still inhabits,--being a hollow made with
trees piled up, with a coating of bark like its original.

The cellar was a separate building, like an ice-house, and it answered for
a refrigerator at this season, our moose-meat being kept there. It was a
potato-hole with a permanent roof. Each structure and institution here was
so primit