An opening was of course left for a door, although many a cabin was built without a window, and when the door was shut received no light save that which came down the chimney, which was always on the outside of the house.  To form it, an opening eight feet long and six feet high was left at one end of the house, and around this a sort of bay window was built of logs and lined with stones on the inside.  Above the top of the opening the chimney contracted and was made of branches smeared both inside and out with clay.  Generally the chimney went to the peak of the roof; but it was by no means unusual for it to stop about halfway up the end of the cabin.

[Illustration:  Log cabin[1]]

[Footnote 1:  The birthplace of Abraham Lincoln, restored (reproduced, together with the first picture on the next page, from Tarbell’s Early Life of Abraham Lincoln, by permission of the publishers, S.S.  McClure, Limited).]

If the settler was too poor to buy glass, or if glass could not be had, the window frame was covered with greased paper, which let in the light but could not be seen through.  The door was of plank with leather hinges, or with iron hinges made from an old wagon tire by the nearest blacksmith or by the settler himself.  There was no knob, no lock, no bolt.

In place of them there was a wooden latch on the inside, which could be lifted by a person on the outside of the door by a leather strip which came through a hole in the door and hung down.  When this latch string was out, anybody could pull it, lift the latch, and come in.  When it was drawn inside, nobody could come in without knocking.  The floor was made of “puncheons,” or planks split and hewn with an ax from the trunk of a tree, and laid with the round side down.  The furniture the settler brought with him, or made on the spot.

[Illustration:  Hand mill [1]]

The household utensils were of the simplest kind.  Brooms and brushes were made of corn husks.  Corn was shelled by hand and was then either carried in a bag slung over a horse’s back to the nearest mill, perhaps fifteen miles away, or was pounded in a wooden hominy mortar with a wooden pestle, or ground in a hand mill.  Chickens and game were roasted by hanging them with leather strings before the open fire.  Cooking stoves were unknown, and all cooking was done in a “Dutch oven,” on the hearth, or in a clay “out oven” built, as its name implies, out of doors.

[Illustration:  Corn-husk broom [1]]

[Illustration:  Kitchen utensils [1]]

[Footnote 1:  From originals in the National Museum, Washington.]

%306.  Clearing and Planting.%—­The land about the cabin was cleared by grubbing the bushes and cutting down trees under a foot in diameter and burning them.  Big trees were “deadened,” or killed, by cutting a “girdle” around them two or three feet above the ground, deep enough to destroy the sap vessels and so prevent the growth of leaves.[1]