30 HUT-BUILDING. 



prairie, but after that we got among trees, chiefly pine, with 

 lovely little prairies scattered through them making charming 

 camping-grounds. At last we reached a place where there was 

 a small opening in the trees, with a fine spring on one side of it 

 a perfect place for a house, so here we decided to erect our 

 cabin. 



We first of all put up the tent and a house made of boughs 

 for my man and his wife, and then marked off a space, twenty 

 feet by sixteen, clearing off the brush and levelling it ; and then 

 came the hardest part of our work, that is, cutting the logs. 

 My man Badger was a good hand with an axe, but I was new 

 to that kind of work, and found it very hard. We had drawn 

 a plan of the house, making it of rather too elaborate a pattern, 

 having gable ends, which are a great deal of trouble to build ; 

 and a house thus built is not any. more comfortable than the 

 common form of log house, which is made as follows : You 

 first put up a frame of logs, notched where they cross one 

 another so as to let them lie close, and of the required dimen- 

 sions, making the back of the house higher by two logs than 

 the front. Out of this you cut what doors and windows you 

 require. You then make the roof by sloping small straight 

 poles from the lower to the higher side, and cover them with 

 grass and a foot of earth, putting cross poles to keep it all 

 on ', and after making your doors and windows your house is 

 finished on the outside, the only things remaining to be done 

 being the chimney and floor, the former of these being always 

 a difficulty. 



We got on very slowly with our house, and were wondering 

 how we were going to raise the higher logs, when an immense 

 half-breed called Tom Boot happened to come along, and we 



