The fire had been freshly kindled with small twigs of the sugar maple, that priceless tree often standing fifty to an acre in the wilderness, and giving the pioneers their best fire-wood, their coolest shade, and their sweetest food.  Vivid blue sparks were still flashing among the little white stars of the gray moss on the big backlog.  From the blazing ends of the log there came the soft, airy music and the faint, sweet scent of bubbling sap.  This main room of Cedar House was very large, almost vast, taking up the whole lower floor.  It was the dining room as well as the sitting room; and when some grand occasion arose, it served even as a drawing-room, and did it handsomely, too.  This great room of Cedar House always reminded David of the ancient halls in “The Famous History of Montilion,” a romance of chivalry from which most of his ideas of life were taken, and upon which most of his ideals of living were formed.  Surely, he thought, the castle of the “Knight of the Oracle” could not be grander than this great room of Cedar House.

The rich dark wood of its walls and floor—­all rudely smoothed with the broadaxe and the whipsaw—­hung overhead in massive beams.  From these low, blackened timbers there swung many antique lamps, splendid enough for a palace and strangely out of place in a log house of the wilderness.  On the rough walls there were also large sconces of burnished silver but poorly filled with tallow candles.  In the bare spaces between these silver sconces were the heads of wild animals mingled with many rifles, both old and new, and other arms of the hunter.  Over the tall mantelpiece there were crossed two untarnished swords which had been worn by the judge’s father in the Revolution.  On the red cedar of the floor, polished by wear and rubbing, there lay the skins of wild beasts, together with costly foreign rugs.  The same strange mixture of rudeness and refinement was to be seen everywhere throughout the room.  The table standing in the centre of the floor, ready for the evening meal, was made of unplaned boards, rudely put together by the unskilled hands of the backwoods.  Yet it was set with the finest china, the rarest glass, and the richest silver that the greatest skill of the old world could supply.  The chairs placed around the table were made of unpainted wood from the forest, with seats woven out of the coarse rushes from the river.  And there, between the front windows, stood Ruth’s piano, the first in that part of the wilderness, and as fine as the finest of its day anywhere.

It is true that something like the same confusion of luxury and wildness was becoming more or less common throughout the country.  The wain trains which had lately followed the packhorse trains over the Alleghanies—­with the widening of the Wilderness Road—­were already bringing many comforts and even luxuries to the cabins of the well-to-do settlers.  But nothing like those which were fetched constantly to Cedar House ever came to any other household;