and men to work under your directions, you can have the regulation door, floor, and roof; the cracks in the wall calked with mortar, and a stone or brick chimney and fireplace built. In fact, you can make a palace of logs, with plate-glass windows, but you will not have a log-cabin, and you will miss all the fun to be derived from creating something by your own labor, which is the highest sort of joy—the joy of the artist! Any “chump,” with money, can hire men to build houses which would be impossible for his stupid brain and clumsy hands to accomplish. Besides which, the men he hired to do the work would be the only ones who derived any real pleasure from the construction of the houses.
You must not understand from this that you are to use
Oiled Paper for Glass, in Your Windows,
if you can obtain real glass, but that in case you cannot, the paper makes a good substitute, and one which was used in many a pioneer’s cabin. In Virginia there are log-houses, still occupied, which have not even a paper window—a hole, closed in bad weather by a wooden shutter, being the only opening besides the doors, and the moonshiners of the mountain districts seldom have windows at all, but depend upon a front and rear door to supply light for the house, and when these doors are closed the fire supplies the illumination.
The Lamps
they use, when they have any, are small pans or saucers filled with melted fat, in which a piece of rag is placed, and furnishes a wick for this primitive light. In 1897 I was given one of these “Betty lights” by a mountain host, to light me to bed.
Every boy’s log-house should be supplied with lanterns and candles, but the candles must be stored in tin boxes, otherwise
The Brownies Will Eat Them.
Brownies are the wild wood-mice and flying-squirrels which will use your house during your absence, and not only eat the candles, but anything else you may leave unprotected. They ate up my soap, and then, for dessert, went to the kitchen and ate up the stove-polish. In small houses you will probably not have stove-polish, or stoves.
After the opening in the wall of the cabin for the fireplace is sawed out, you may build up a good, strong wall, on the three outer sides of