56 AT THE NORTH OF BEARCAMP WATER . 
pieces of the stove lay on the floor, and although 
the roof had been sprung by snow resting heav¬ 
ily upon it, the hut was as dry and habitable as 
ever. It even retained the “stuffy’ 7 smell of a 
dirty and ill-ventilated house. It was inhabited, 
too, not by men, but by hedgehogs, as the Amer¬ 
ican porcupine is universally called in New 
Hampshire. They had been under it, through 
it, and over it. Every piece of stair, joist, or 
floor, upon which salt or grease had fallen, had 
been gnawed away by them. They had slept in 
the bunks both upstairs and down, and the stairs 
bore traces of their constant use. 
In front of the hut stood a watering-trough. 
It was a huge log hollowed by the axe into two 
tanks, a small one at the upper end for man’s 
use, and a larger one below for the cattle. 
Small logs had been neatly grooved as spouts to 
lead the water from the brook to the trough. 
Moss grew upon them now and the summer sun¬ 
light shone upon them, but it was easy to ima¬ 
gine the snow piled high upon the hills, smother¬ 
ing the brooks and burying the rough spouts, 
and to fancy that over the trampled snow the 
woolly and steaming oxen came to drink of the 
water, while a sturdy French Canadian broke 
the ice with his axe and drank at the spot where 
from under the snow the spouts led the water 
into his end of the dugout. The cattle are dead. 
