HOUSE AND GARDEN 
September, 1911 
159 
classical simplicity of line, and always eloquent harmony of color. 
There are two gates. One, the Japanese gate, true to the Jap¬ 
anese way, and a very awesome affair if you meet it in a dim 
light, leading through a leaf-hung labyrinth which in the fair sea¬ 
son is flecked with spots of lantern light. At the upper gate you 
meet the sign of the Black Hen (which explains the hut simile) 
and drive past the brooder houses and hen mysteries of the upper 
farm, to the cabin itself. 
The log cabin is not Japanese. Frederick Remington decided 
that it was “Just plain North American,” and the description fits 
all that you will find on this busy and blossoming level. Yes, we 
have come up out of the little Japanese paradise for the moment 
to a region of native lines and native ideas. I shall tell you in a 
moment some things that will suggest how the Japanese theory of 
things, like an aroma from the out-spreading garden below, has 
been able to invade and, to my thinking, transfigure for the time, 
certain nooks of this sternly North American abode. Just now, 
let me supplement the picture which you will have already looked 
at, by saying that the cabin seems to grow out of the soil. The 
boulders of the chimney begin in a heap, rising casually in the 
earth as if debating whether they would be a chimney. Once they 
make up their minds, the chimney gets down to business and be¬ 
comes the real thing in chimneys. There is another one beyond, 
heaped in the heart of the house—the one with the Burroughs 
tablet. 
Bigger boulders fringe the brow of the hill and mark the edge 
of the terrace. Your path from the carriage-way twists over 
broad slabs that again seem like a happy accident in nature's 
architecture, until you find yourself under the wide overhang of 
the roof. You tether your hat on a peg. If you have any senti¬ 
ment you will not hang it on Dr. Hornaday’s peg, or Frederick 
Remington's or Ernest Thompson Seton’s or James T. Powers’— 
they are all labelled just as yours will be labelled, a wide row of 
them. Artists, writers, publishers, travellers, captains of industry 
—there is a long list of foreign and native notables, and a sprink¬ 
ling of plain folks. 
Then the stained chestnut half-door, studded with metal, swings 
to your welcome and you step into the full shelter of that long, low 
roof. Oliver Wendell Holmes once remarked that “the hat is the 
vulnerable point of the artificial integument.” The roof is the hat 
of a house. And it is the vulnerable point. To produce the right 
ensemble in a house, first catch your roof. Let us not be bigoted. 
There are m a n v 
sorts of proper 
roof. But the line 
of this one, follow¬ 
ing the slow slant 
of the big hills, 
not effronting the 
storm, wide in its 
shadows for the 
torrid days, snug¬ 
gling close to the 
shrub-and-tree-dot- 
ted plateau, surely 
has a consistent 
and enduri n g 
charm. 
The logs of the 
cabin end uneven¬ 
ly at the notched 
ends. I can fancy 
the first dismay of 
the native builders 
when the designer 
insisted on the 
rough realism of these uneven ends. There are other things here 
that must have puzzled these native builders, who certainly 
budded better than they knew. The inset wood designs in these 
straight, heavy, unpanelled dbors, for one thing, must have 
seemed more than a trifle eccentric to the country carpenter— 
and he had to be the country carpenter, for it was part of the plan 
of the designer (who sat near the workmen, her drawings in her 
lap, and forgetting them frequently, I fancy, in impromptu crea¬ 
tion) that every stone, stick and hand should represent the region 
in which the house was made to grow. 
But you are looking at the broad living-room fireplace with its 
big crane, transplanted from some venerable hearth, and its cav¬ 
ern vast enough to give elbow room to the husky oak from the 
wood-box rising head-high on the right hand. Along the edge of 
the shelf under the Burroughs tablet, runs a whimsical line from 
the “Book of Tea”—and if you have not read the “Book of Tea” 
you have missed one of those enchanting book-excursions which 
only happen to the most vagrant of us once in a long while. 
When you come close enough to the mantel, you 
read: “Let us linger here in the beautiful fool¬ 
ishness of things.” 
If you miss the philosophy of that line, I’m 
afraid that you will miss the philosophy of the 
cabin, you will miss a feeling of something fine, 
quaintly done, in everything about you. 
And yet the oddest things about this living- 
room have a reasonableness when you become 
conscious of them, that might well illustrate 
some of the deeper meanings of that debated 
word Art. The wide-silled windows looking out 
upon the valley are as logical as a log, if it 
comes to that. The curtains of unbleached linen 
seem as inevitable as the golden brown of the 
ammonia-fumed natural wood—a superb hue, 
by the way, a background fit to set off a Japan¬ 
ese lily or any splash of color that chances near. 
The bookshelves—yes, there are many books, 
and books again; books that range the world, 
that ransack the arts and sciences, that ransack 
life. There are big chairs in which to read 
them, chairs that gather you up while you ’’lin¬ 
ger here” and “find yourself.” Barbaric blan¬ 
kets the Navajoes made, some of them from 
The log cabin is “just plain North American” and seems to grow right out of the 
soil 
The Japanese gate, an awesome affair in a 
dim light, leads into a wonderfully beauti¬ 
ful drive up the hill, now past a mass of 
rhododendrons, now following the brook 
