CHESUNCOOK. 
129 
and it answered for a refrigerator at this season, our 
moose-meat being kept there. It was a potato-hole with 
a permanent roof. Each structure and institution here * 
was so primitive that you could at once refer it to its 
source; but our buildings commonly suggest neither their 
origin nor their purpose. There was a large, and w r hat 
farmers would call handsome, barn, part of whose boards 
had been sawed by a whip-saw; and the saw-pit, with its 
great pile of dust, remained before the house. The long 
split shingles on a portion of the barn were laid a foot 
to the weather, suggesting what kind of weather they 
have there. Grant’s barn at Caribou Lake was said to 
be still larger, the biggest ox-nest in the woods, fifty feet 
by a hundred. Think of a monster barn in that primi¬ 
tive forest lifting its gray back above the tree-tops! 
Man makes very much such a nest for his domestic ani¬ 
mals, of withered grass and fodder, as the squirrels and 
many other wild creatures do for themselves. 
There was also a blacksmith’s shop, where plainly a 
good deal of work was done. The oxen and horses used 
in lumbering operations were shod, and all the iron-work 
of sleds, etc., was repaired or made here. I saw them 
load a bateau at the Moosehead carry, the next Tuesday, 
with about thirteen hundred weight of bar iron for this 
shop. This reminded me how primitive and honorable 
a trade was Vulcan’s. I do not hear that there was any 
carpenter or tailor among the gods. The smith seems to 
have preceded these and every other mechanic at Che- 
suncook as well as on Olympus, and his family is the 
most widely dispersed, whether he be christened John or 
Ansell. 
Smith owned two miles down the lake by half a mile 
in width. There were about one hundred acres cleared 
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