y any chinking and the effect
would be far more pleasing to good taste. As it is they merely notch the
logs at the corners, leaving wide spaces to be filled up with splits,
rocks, mud--anything to keep out the weather. As a matter of fact, few
houses ever are thoroughly chinked and he who would take pains to make a
workmanlike job of chinking would be ridiculed as "fussin' around like
an old granny-woman." Nobody but a tenderfoot feels drafts, you know.

It is hard to keep such a dwelling clean, even if the family be small.
The whole structure being built of green timber throughout, soon
shrinks, checks, warps and sags, so that there cannot be a square joint,
a neat fit, a perpendicular face, or a level place anywhere about it.
The roof droops in a season or two, the shingles curl and leaky places
open. Flooring shrinks apart, leaving wide and irregular cracks through
which the winter winds are sucked upward as through so many flues (no
mountain home has a cellar under it). Everywhere there are crannies and
rough surfaces to hold dust and soot, there being probably not a single
planed board in the whole house.

But, for all that, there is something very attractive and picturesque
about the little old log cabin. In its setting of ancient forests and
mighty hills it fits, it harmonizes, where the prim and precise product
of modern carpentry would shock an artistic eye. The very roughness of
the honest logs and the home-made furniture gives texture to the
picture. Having no mathematically straight lines nor uniform curves, the
cabin's outlines conform to its surroundings. Without artificial stain,
or varnish, or veneer, it _is_ what it seems, a genuine thing, a jewel
in the rough. And it is a home. When wind whistles through the cracks
and snow sifts into the corners of the room one draws his stumpy little
split-bottomed chair close to the wide hearth and really knows the
comfort of fire leaping and sap singing from big birch logs.

Every room except the kitchen (if there be a kitchen) has a couple of
beds in it: enough all told for the family and, generally, one spare
bed. If much company comes, some pallets are made on the floor for the
women and children of the household. In a single-room cabin there
usually is a cockloft, reached by a ladder, for storage, and maybe a
bunk or two. Closets and pantries there are none, for they would only
furnish good harborage for woods-rats and other vermin.

Everything must be in si