Log cabin

“ The fringe of trees and ragged cliffs upon the side toward the lake hid the tableland completely from that direction. And, set between two gnarled cedars, at the very edge of a dense bit of the forest where it ran out from the sea of verdure like a cape, was a low, rambling log cabin, a thin spiral of smoke winding up from its stone chimney. Here was “home.”
The cabin had all the signs of age, discolored by many Winters, a vine a dozen years old climbing over it. And Johnny Watson, who had known the Devil’s Pocket for a quarter of a century, had said that no man ever lived here! ”

“ And the log-cabin and its clearing were picturesque enough to the eye of an artist, though speaking of all lack of skill and thrift and industry to the eye of a farmer. Even the garden in front of the cabin was being slowly and surely swallowed up into the wilderness again. The sunflowers flourished and bloomed and seeded, forming food-stores for multitudes of birds; and the squirrels would flicker down the tree-trunks and feast upon the seeds which the birds dropped, spitting the hard shells deftly to right and left through their whiskers. ”

“ For myself, I only want my little log cabin with the wild vines climbing over its walls and clinging to the mud-chinked crevices, where I can hear the song of wild birds mingled with the sleepy hum of bees moving from blossom to blossom about the doorway; where I can see the timid red deer, as, peeping out of the brush, it hesitates between the fear of man and the temptation of the white clover growing in front of my home, and where I can watch the endless procession of waves following each other up the bay. ”

“ A dim, shadowy, phantom-like chain flitting silently through the forest depths. A living chain, composed of human beings—at least in outward semblance—bent upon an errand of bloodshed and death.
They pause at the edge of a considerable clearing, and gaze out upon it. A rude log-cabin stands here at the foot of a good-sized hill. In the darkness, it seems as though there were two buildings, but one is a huge square bowlder. A mass of rock that has puzzled many to tell where it came from. It gives a name to the cabin and its owners, "the people of the lodge by the great rock." ”

“ The Fresno Big Trees covered an area of about four square miles, and while wandering about surveying the boundaries of the grove, anxious to see every tree, I came suddenly on a handsome log cabin, richly embowered and so fresh and unweathered it was still redolent of gum and balsam like a newly felled tree. Strolling forward, wondering who could have built it, I found an old, weary-eyed, speculative, gray-haired man on a bark stool by the door, reading a book. ”

“ Not far from the brink of this awful abyss, and close behind the horseshoe range of rocks, stood a humble log-cabin, occupied by an old free negress, who picked up a scanty living by telling fortunes and showing the way to the Punch Bowl. Her cabin went by the name of the Witch's Hut, or Old Hat's Cabin. A short distance from Hat's cabin the road became impassable, and the travelers got out, and, preceded by the coachman bearing the lantern, struggled along on foot through the drifted snow and against the buffeting wind and sleet to where a faint light guided them to the house. ”

“ My friends, from the very earliest period of American history the log cabin has been the cradle of our greatest men. Lincoln, Grant and a host of others began life in a log cabin. Our churches and our school houses, the bulwarks of our nation's strength and greatness, began to shoot out their branches of education from the 'little old log cabin.' The magnitude of this great country is like the rough gem in the hands of the lapidary. He takes no credit for its possession, but he does take credit for what skill he may exercise in making it beautiful and more valuable. ”

“ There is a small log cabin on a mound of the wilderness. A dense forest breaks the northern winds. A rippling stream runs by the door. Beyond lies the prairie rich in verdure and enamelled with gorgeous autumnal flowers. Herds of buffalo are grazing in groups of hundreds, sometimes of thousands, on the broad expanse. Gangs of deer are seen, graceful, beautiful, following in the train of the antlered bucks, and with scent so keen and eyes so piercing that it requires the utmost skill of the hunter to approach them within rifle shot. ”

“ Nothing is more comfortable than a log cabin which has been carefully built and finished; but for some reason—probably because there seemed always a more urgent duty calling to us around the corner—we never plastered our house at all. The result was that on many future winter mornings we awoke to find ourselves chastely blanketed by snow, while the only warm spot in our living-room was that directly in front of the fireplace, where great logs burned all day. Even there our faces scorched while our spines slowly congealed, until we learned to revolve before the fire like a bird upon a spit. ”

“ Before a log cabin, in a sway-sided rocker, creaked a tall, white, flabby woman, once nearly beautiful, now rubbed at the edges. She rose, huddling her wrapper about her bosom, as they drove into the clearing and picked their way through stumps and briars. ”

“ Life in the log-cabin had not become pleasanter with the advance of the summer; we were all impatient to be out of it. We looked forward to our occupation of the new house with an eagerness which even in us boys must have had some sense of present discomfort at the bottom of it. We were to have a parlor, a dining-room, and a library; there were to be three chambers for the family and a spare room; after six months in the log-cabin we could hardly have imagined it, if we had not seen these divisions actually made by the studding. ”

“ It was rather a large cabin as trail cabins go, with a rickety sheet-iron stove in the middle, burned full of holes, and it was hours before the fire began to make any impression on the obstinate, sullen cold of that hut. When we went to bed the frost still stood thick and heavy on the walls all over the room. A log building, properly constructed, is a warm building, but slowness in parting with heat means slowness in receiving heat, and a log cabin that has been unoccupied for a long time in very cold weather is hard to heat in one evening. ”

“ An hour or two later I arose, swallowed a handful of dried herbs by way of breakfast, and forced open the cabin door. It was an altered world that greeted me; the clouds had rolled away, and the sky, barely tinged with the last fading pink and buff of dawn, was of a pale, unruffled blue. But a white sheet covered the ground, and mantled the roofs of the log huts, and wove fantastic patterns over the limbs of leafless bushes and trees. All things seemed new-made and beautiful, yet all were wintry and forlorn—and what a majestic sight were the encircling peaks! ”

“ Be that as it may, a small trail of smoke one day made its way aloft from a log cabin half buried in the snow; while a pack of a dozen malamutes played about the door. A pile of logs and sticks of firewood, an axe, a tin bucket, and dog-sleds near, gave undisputed evidence of the presence here of someone besides natives. ”

“ Now that we know how to make doors and door-latches, locks, bolts, and bars, we may busy ourselves with building an American log cabin. It is all well enough to build our shacks and shanties and camps of logs with the bark on them, but, when one wishes to build a log cabin, one wants a house that will last. ”

“ In writing this work, I have, with peculiar interest, lived over the scenes and incidents of my varied frontier experience; have travelled once more amid the waving grasses and beckoning flowers; heard again the bark of the wolf, and the voices of birds; felt on my brow the kiss of the health-giving breeze; worshipped anew in the log-cabin sanctuary. Yes, East and West are both dear to me. One fittingly supplements the other. Each holds the ashes of kindred. ”

“ Long, burnished white lines lay upon its gleaming surface, and looking back Demeré could see beyond the shadow and sheen of the sloping bank the cleared space, where the moonbeams fell in unbroken splendor before the stockade, and through its open gate the log-cabin with its primitive porch, where, young and beautiful, she sat in her white dress in the bright light beside the silent little flax-wheel. ”

“ AN enthusiastic hunter, having lost his way, wandered Helplessly about in an apparently endless cedar swamp until dark, when a distant light attracted him to a log cabin near a new mining location. The cabin's sole occupant proved to be a stolid but hospitable Swede, who obligingly consented to share his supper and his bed with the tired and hungry stranger. ”

“ The early settler did have one implement which became wonderfully useful to him, which was the ax. He soon learned to use this in making for himself and family a more permanent dwelling-place, the log cabin. At first the log cabin was of round logs, notched at the ends, and fitted together at the corners, roofed with logs or with bark on poles, having a door of rough slabs and hung on wooden hinges or straps of hide, and if a window, with a shutter similar to the door, and without floor or loft. ”

“ Then they must be ready for a long journey in the cars and steamboats, up rivers and across lakes, and sometimes for miles and miles through woods, where they see no houses nor people, excepting here and there a single log cabin with two or three ragged children at play outside, or a baby creeping over the doorstep, while farther on among the trees stands a man with his axe, cutting, with heavy blows, some tall trees into such logs as those of which the house is built. ”

“ Such moments never pass; they are ineffaceable; their rapture immortalizes; from them we know that whatever perishes there is something in us that cannot die, that divinely regrets, divinely hopes. [Pg 46]
XI
Our log-cabin, stood only a stone’s cast from the gray old weather-tinted grist-mill, whose voice was music for us by night and by day, so that on Sundays, when the water was shut off from the great tub-wheels in its basement, it was as if the world had gone deaf and dumb. ”

“ Though Alick had advised us to wait till sundown, as we saw no one moving about and the nature of the ground afforded us sufficient concealment, we advanced farther, when what was our surprise, as we got round a thickly wooded point, to see, not an Indian wigwam, but a substantially built log cabin, with a stone chimney, from which the smoke was ascending.
“The inhabitants, whoever they are, are not likely to be unfriendly,” exclaimed Robin. ”

“ It did not happen to me to be born in a log cabin, but my elder brothers and sisters were born in a log cabin raised amid the snowdrifts of New Hampshire, at a period so early that when the smoke rose first from its rude chimney and curled over the frozen hills there was no similar evidence of a white man's habitation between it and the settlements on the rivers of Canada. ”

“ So here I am cooped up again in a log cabin in the center of an undulating plain where there might have been unending wheat fields once upon a time.... Not a solitary animal is in sight.... The road out yonder looks much the worse for wear. ”

“ How lightly past hardship sits upon us! All the misery of the night vanished, as if it had not been, in the shelter of the log cabin at Mud Pond, with dry clothes that fitted us as the skin of the bear fits him in the spring, a noble breakfast, a toasting fire, solicitude about our comfort, judicious sympathy with our suffering, and willingness to hear the now growing tale of our adventure. ”

“ The smoke of his chimney mingles with that of no other: its tall column ascends to heaven solitary as the squatter himself.
The clearing is of an irregular semi-circular shape—a deep narrow stream forming the chord, and afterwards cleaving its way through the otherwise unbroken forest. In the convexity of the arc, at that point most remote from the water, stands the cabin—a log “shanty” with “clapboard” roof—on one side flanked by a rude horse-shed, on the other by a corn-crib of split rails.
Such a picture is almost peculiar to the backwoods of America. Some may deem it commonplace. ”

“ He paused in a puddle of the lane that left the turnpike not far off, and curved between the new-plowed fields in front of a double log cabin, which had the air of being one of the best habitations of its time though its time was long past; the logs it was built of were squared; the chimneys at either end were of stone masonry instead of notched sticks laid in clay. Against the wall of the porch between the two rooms of the cabin an old man sat tilted back in his chair, smoking a pipe which he took from his mouth at sight of the stranger's arrest. ”

“ An abandoned clearing or a deserted log cabin, something to which man has set his hand and then withdrawn it, seems always a place of peculiar fascination to the creatures of the wilderness. They have some sense, perhaps, of having regained a lost dominion. ”

“ Lincoln Log-cabin.
Probably not many Northern girls have ever seen a genuine log-cabin, though some may have spent part of their Summer vacation in recently built log-houses in the 196mountains, but these buildings are usually too luxurious and spacious to bear any resemblance to the pioneer structure of logs. The rare human life which has passed through some of these old log-cabins and left its influence upon the world, will cause the cabins to be remembered long after the more pretentious mansions have been forgotten. It is noble lives which are of real worth, not inanimate things. ”