which suits your fancy; it may be framed, as described in Chapter VII., or, by using round poles, it may be framed as shown by Fig. 98 and roofed with slabs or planks, as shown by Fig. 100, or the roof may be shingled with “clapboards,” a name used for shingles or boards, about three feet long, and laid on as ordinary shingles are—first course at the eaves, second course breaking joints and overlapping the first, and so on, until the roof-tree is reached.
If shingles, clapboards, and planks are out of reach, the roof may be shingled with bark; if birch bark is used, it can be held in place by poles laid upon the outside of the roof, as I have often seen the hand-rived clapboards held in place where they use no nails in the construction of their homes.
The Most Essential Piece of Furniture
for the house, if you are to live in it, is the bed or bunk. This can be made in various simple and effective patterns. At the Sportsmen’s Show in New York there was an elaborately constructed bedstead, made of the rough branches of trees, but however ornamental this style of couch may be, it is not essential to comfort, and requires time and skill to manufacture, neither of which the average boy is willing to lavish on camp furniture.
The Bunks
shown in the plan (Fig. 93), are made with two horizontal poles, flattened at the ends and upon one side, after the manner of the rough sketch at the Fig. 94. These poles extend from side to side of the cabin, and rest upon the logs of the wall, to which they are securely nailed. The ends are further supported by a cross-plank, or pole, fastened to the walls, as a support for the side-rods of the bunk. Slats are made of sticks split in half and nailed to the side-bars, as shown in the plan. One bunk is placed over another, until there is no room for more, and then the three or more bunks are filled with straw, hay, or spruce boughs, over which the blankets are spread, and the bed is made.
With a mud-sill house you can
Make a Lincoln Bed.
Abraham Lincoln’s father had no bedstead, and no means of getting one but to make it, and no tools but an auger and axe to make it with. A stake was driven in the ground, near the corner of the cabin, about four feet from one of the walls, and six feet from the other. Auger-holes were then bored in the wall opposite, and poles driven into them, the other ends meeting on the stake; across these were laid laths rived from an oak, and upon them rested the straw-bed of our great President.
