and many other fruits and vegetables as well; and he had usually a horse or two, cows, and perhaps hogs and sheep, if the wolves and bears did not interfere.  If he was poor his cabin was made of unhewn logs, and held but a single room; if well-to-do, the logs were neatly hewed, and besides the large living- and eating-room with its huge stone fireplace, there was also a small bedroom and a kitchen, while a ladder led to the loft above, in which the boys slept.  The floor was made of puncheons, great slabs of wood hewed carefully out, and the roof of clapboards.  Pegs of wood were thrust into the sides of the house, to serve instead of a wardrobe; and buck antlers, thrust into joists, held the ever-ready rifles.  The table was a great clapboard set on four wooden legs; there were three-legged stools, and in the better sort of houses old-fashioned rocking-chairs.[20] The couch or bed was warmly covered with blankets, bear-skins, and deer-hides.[21]

These clearings lay far apart from one another in the wilderness.  Up to the door-sills of the log-huts stretched the solemn and mysterious forest.  There were no openings to break its continuity; nothing but endless leagues on leagues of shadowy, wolf-haunted woodland.  The great trees towered aloft till their separate heads were lost in the mass of foliage above, and the rank underbrush choked the spaces between the trunks.  On the higher peaks and ridge-crests of the mountains there were straggling birches and pines, hemlocks and balsam firs;[22] elsewhere, oaks, chestnuts, hickories, maples, beeches, walnuts, and great tulip trees grew side by side with many other kinds.  The sunlight could not penetrate the roofed archway of murmuring leaves; through the gray aisles of the forest men walked always in a kind of mid-day gloaming.  Those who had lived in the open plains felt when they came to the backwoods as if their heads were hooded.  Save on the border of a lake, from a cliff top, or on a bald knob—­that is, a bare hill-shoulder,—­they could not anywhere look out for any distance.

All the land was shrouded in one vast forest.  It covered the mountains from crest to river-bed, filled the plains, and stretched in sombre and melancholy wastes towards the Mississippi.  All that it contained, all that lay hid within it and beyond it, none could tell; men only knew that their boldest hunters, however deeply they had penetrated, had not yet gone through it, that it was the home of the game they followed and the wild beasts that preyed on their flocks, and that deep in its tangled depths lurked their red foes, hawk-eyed and wolf-hearted.