for recreation and the pleasure to be derived from the
occupation.

When our house was finished we had no shutters to the windows and no way
of closing up the open ends of the gallery, and my helpers told me that I
must not leave the house that way because stray cattle would use the house
for a stable and break the windows with their horns as they swung their
heads to drive away the flies. So we nailed boards over these openings
when we closed the house for the winter. Later we invented some shutters
(see _C_, Fig. 290) which can be put up with little trouble and in a few
moments. Fig. 290, _C_, shows how these shutters are put in place and
locked on the inside by a movable sill that is slid up against the bottom
of the shutters and fastened in place by iron pins let into holes bored
for the purpose.

Fig. 290.

[Illustration: Details of author's log house, Wildlands.]

Of course, this forms no bar to a professional burglar, but there is
nothing inside to tempt cracksmen, and these professional men seldom stray
into the woods. The shutters serve to keep out cattle, small boys, and
stray fishermen whose idle curiosity might tempt them to meddle with the
contents of a house less securely fastened.

A house is never really finished until one loses interest in it and stops
tinkering and planning homely improvements. This sort of work is a
healthy, wholesome occupation and just the kind necessary to people of
sedentary occupations or those whose misfortune it is to be engaged in
some of the nerve-racking business peculiar to life in big cities.

Dwellers in our big cities do not seem to realize that there is any other
life possible for them than a continuous nightmare existence amid
monstrous buildings, noisy traffic, and the tainted air of unsanitary
streets. They seem to have forgotten that the same sun that in summer
scorches the towering masonry and paved sidewalks until the canyon-like
streets become unbearable also shines on green woods, tumbling waters, and
mirror-like lakes; or, if they are dimly conscious of this fact, they
think such places are so far distant as to be practically out of their
reach in every sense. Yet in reality the wilderness is almost knocking at
our doors, for within one hundred miles of New York bears, spotted
wildcats, and timid deer live unconfined in their primitive wild
condition. Fish caught in the streams can be cooked for dinner in New York
the same day.

In 1887, when the writer