128 
THE MAINE WOODS* 
at in the biography of Orpheus; none of your frilled 
or fluted columns, which have cut such a false swell, 
and support nothing but a gable end and their builder’s 
pretensions, — that is, with the multitude; and as for 
66 ornamentation,” one of those words with a dead tail 
which architects very properly use to describe their flour¬ 
ishes, there were the lichens and mosses and fringes of 
bark, which nobody troubled himself about. We cer¬ 
tainly leave the handsomest paint and clapboards be¬ 
hind in the woods, when we strip off the bark and poison 
ourselves with white-lead in the towns. We get but 
half the spoils of the forest. For beauty, give me trees 
with the fur on. This house was designed and con¬ 
structed with the freedom of stroke of a forester’s axe, 
without other compass and square than Nature uses. 
Wherever the logs were cut off by a window or door, 
that is, were not kept in place by alternate overlapping, 
they were held one upon another by very large pins, 
driven in diagonally on each side, where branches might 
have been, and then cut off so close up and down as not 
to project beyond the bulge of the log, as if the logs 
clasped each other in their arms. These logs were posts, 
studs, boards, clapboards, laths, plaster, and nails, all in 
one. Where the citizen uses a mere sliver or board, the 
pioneer uses the whole trunk of a tree. The house had 
large stone chimneys, and was roofed with. spruce-bark. 
The windows were imported, all but the casings. One 
end was a regular logger’s camp, for the boarders, with 
the usual fir floor and log benches. Thus this house was 
but a slight departure from the hollow tree, which the 
bear still inhabits, — being a hollow made with trees 
piled up, with a coating of bark like its original. 
The cellar was a separate building, like an ice-house. 
