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 primitive that you could at once refer it to its source; but our buildings commonly suggest neither their origin nor their purpose.  There was a large, and what farmers would call handsome, barn, part of whose boards had been sawed by a whip-saw; and the saw-pit, with its great pile of dust, remained before the house.  The long split shingles on a portion of the barn were laid a foot to the weather, suggesting what kind of weather they have there.  Grant’s barn at Caribou Lake was said to be still larger, the biggest ox-nest in the woods, fifty feet by a hundred.  Think of a monster barn in that primitive forest lifting its gray back above the tree-tops!  Man makes very much such a nest for his domestic animals, of withered grass and fodder, as the squirrels and many other wild creatures do for themselves.