unks fall with a crash; vistas are opened towards the lake and
the mountains. The spot for the shanty is cleared of underbrush; forked
stakes are driven into the ground, cross-pieces are laid on them, and
poles sloping back to the ground. In an incredible space of time there
is the skeleton of a house, which is entirely open in front. The roof
and sides must be covered. For this purpose the trunks of great spruces
are skinned. The woodman rims the bark near the foot of the tree, and
again six feet above, and slashes it perpendicularly; then, with a blunt
stick, he crowds off this thick hide exactly as an ox is skinned.
It needs but a few of these skins to cover the roof; and they make a
perfectly water-tight roof, except when it rains. Meantime busy hands
have gathered boughs of the spruce and the feathery balsam, and shingled
the ground underneath the shanty for a bed. It is an aromatic bed: in
theory it is elastic and consoling. Upon it are spread the blankets. The
sleepers, of all sexes and ages, are to lie there in a row, their feet
to the fire, and their heads under the edge of the sloping roof. Nothing
could be better contrived. The fire is in front: it is not a fire, but
a conflagration--a vast heap of green logs set on fire--of pitch, and
split dead-wood, and crackling balsams, raging and roaring. By the time,
twilight falls, the cook has prepared supper. Everything has been cooked
in a tin pail and a skillet,--potatoes, tea, pork, mutton, slapjacks.
You wonder how everything could have been prepared in so few utensils.
When you eat, the wonder ceases: everything might have been cooked
in one pail. It is a noble meal; and nobly is it disposed of by these
amateur savages, sitting about upon logs and roots of trees. Never were
there such potatoes, never beans that seemed to have more of the bean in
them, never such curly pork, never trout with more Indian-meal on them,
never mutton more distinctly sheepy; and the tea, drunk out of a tin
cup, with a lump of maple-sugar dissolved in it,--it is the sort of tea
that takes hold, lifts the hair, and disposes the drinker to anecdote
and hilariousness. There is no deception about it: it tastes of tannin
and spruce and creosote. Everything, in short, has the flavor of
the wilderness and a free life. It is idyllic. And yet, with all our
sentimentality, there is nothing feeble about the cooking. The slapjacks
are a solid job of work, made to last, and not go to pieces in a
per