108 
House & Garden 
260 General Electric Floodlight Projectors have 
made the Goddess of Liberty a new woman. 
The right light 
for the lady 
There is fine symbol- 
ismin the fact thatthe 
Statue of Liberty is 
lighted by electricity. 
For electricity is a 
great Liberator. Its 
function is to drive out 
darkness; to free wo¬ 
men from household 
drudgery and to trans- 
fer heavy burdens 
from men’s shoulders 
to the shoulders of 
machines. Let it do 
more for you. 
GENERAL ELECTRIC 
There were only 
1277 electric light 
and power compa¬ 
nies when the Gen¬ 
eral Electric Com¬ 
pany was founded in 
1892. To-day there 
are over 7000 com¬ 
panies with a total 
investment of more 
than five billion dol- 
lars. Electricity 
moves forward with 
a giant stride. 
BACK to LOG CABINS 
{Continued from page 71) 
Now you are all ready for your grand 
finale, finished flooring, doors, setting 
your casement windows into place, put¬ 
ting on your hardware, making enough 
closets, cupboards and shelves to please 
your wife, and constructing appropriate 
furniture for your place. For the love 
o’ sweet Heaven, man, don’t turn your 
self-respecting cabin into an asylum for 
decrepit city furniture, leaking out its 
insides. “Excelsior” may be an excellent 
slogan for an Alpine village but it’s a 
darn poor one for an untrammeled va¬ 
cation in the woods. Any man who 
can build a cabin can certainly make 
furniture to fit into the general har¬ 
mony of things and this is a good place 
to use up all you have left of your 
slab lumber with the bark on. 
Your doors are mighty picturesque 
fashioned of either lengthwise or cross¬ 
strips of this shaggy lumber stained 
with a forest green stain—a color fin¬ 
ish that amply repays the little labor 
and time it takes to apply. One coat 
brushed in well is sufficient, and far 
better than two coats applied now— 
though next year you may want to 
touch up your frames here and there 
where they have sun-faded somewhat. 
While you are wielding the brush and 
the can of stain, get the rest busy on 
calking—a long job and one where the 
whole family can lend a hand. The 
amount of oakum you can fill in de¬ 
pends, naturally, on how well your 
logs are fitted in the first place. But 
if there is any left over, keep it—inas¬ 
much as for a couple of years your 
logs are going to shrink a little and 
your calking will have to be looked 
to until they’ve reached a size which 
is comfortable to themselves. There are 
other chink-filling devices besides using 
oakum, but nothing anywhere near so 
satisfactory. Oakum not only makes 
your cabin snug and tight but it is 
also a preventative of bugs, moths and 
vermin—similar to the friendly office 
performed by the tar paper between 
the floors. 
By the way, in answer to your ques¬ 
tion, “W’hat’s the use of dressed lumber 
in a cabin?”—the floor is one place 
where it seems desirable. We had the 
same notion as you have—all rough 
lumber. After one season, however, of 
getting along with rough flooring, 
which, despite all efforts at tight laying 
in the first place, shrunk to admit all 
the flies in the neighborhood every time 
we had a fish dinner, we decided unani¬ 
mously on a matched floor of dressed 
lumber, stained a rich dark brown to 
match our footprints on a rainy day. 
Between the rough floor and this we 
laid tar paper, letting the ends come up 
well between the flooring and the walls 
to keep out any undesirables that might 
try to effect an entrance in this way. 
Your final chores which, by rights, 
ought to be got at as soon as your cabin 
is ready for habitation, is the oiling, in¬ 
side and out with two coats of linseed 
oil—the first coat being thinned out 
about twenty percent with turpentine. 
Not only does the oil finish help to pre¬ 
serve the wood and—theoretically at 
least—render it less liable to checking, 
but it retains for your cabin its new 
and colorful appearance. Remember 
that logs do not weather artistically as 
do shingles. They merely turn dull 
and drab and seedy looking. Upon my 
canoe trips, I have investigated any 
number of cabins of trappers, rangers, 
and settlers in general and have yet to 
find one whose beauty was enhanced 
by its dingy weathering. 
Just a hint, to close: If you don’t 
complete everything about your cabin 
the first season, don’t worry over it. 
Take the construction of your little 
dream home in the woods as a pleasure 
and not a sentence at hard labor. 
Leave some chores to go back to next 
year. Nothing is so restful during the 
strenuous season of trying to make 
both ends meet and tying a knot in ’em 
as to close your eyes upon all evidences 
of civilization about you and dream 
of the good licks you are going to put 
in on your woods cabin the minute you 
can break away from the demnition 
grind. 
Here’s to your success. Let me know 
how you come on! 
Yours, 
Aldrich. 
D ear Mac:— 
Your wife’s idea of Heaven being 
a fireplace with a porch around it may 
not be exactly orthodox, but it’s a 
mighty comforting picture. Anyhow, it 
suggests what are likely to be the main¬ 
springs of your log cabin. As it is all 
I have to go on until I hear from you 
of further developments of the dream 
house in the woods, I am sending you 
a few pictures of our materializations 
along the fireplace and porch idea— 
at Pals’ Cove-on-North-Shore. 
By the way, in your letter you have 
cited the only argument against a porch 
on a cabin, namely, that the pioneer 
archetype hadn’t any. I have heard 
that argument several times before and 
I have found that two words will re¬ 
fute it, “Too bad!” At least if it is not 
adequate refutation, its serves the same 
purpose—it silences the arguer. Proba¬ 
bly the pioneer mother had no time 
to take advantage of a porch in the day 
time, and as for utilizing it at night 
as we do in our age, it simply wasn’t 
done in pioneer etiquette. The pioneer, 
even the modern variety, is strongly 
averse to sleeping even with the window 
ajar. 
Nobody can tell you what sort of a 
porch you want until you have told 
him what you want it for. Every va¬ 
riety may be adapted and worked 
out in logs and, however much of an 
iconoclast you are, you want the thing 
to conform in some measure to the 
design of your cabin. If all you want 
is a platform hooded by an extension 
of roof to keep the water from drib¬ 
bling down your neck when you poke 
your head outside the door to see when 
it’s going to clear up—look about you 
for some oddly shaped, crooked forma¬ 
tion on your trees, some naturally curly 
or permanently-waved limbs, and utilize 
them for brackets, bark and all. Which 
brings me to the observation that you 
want a porch with the bark on. There 
may be one or two practical arguments 
against it, but they are weak and 
wavering against the strong assertions 
of greater beauty and harmony with 
the surroundings. 
Your ideal of the cabin is to have it 
a lovely thing that seems to spring up 
naturally, and the porch is the chief 
factor in bringing this about. As the 
columns of the trees lead to the porch, 
so this latter leads to the more com¬ 
plete shelter of your hearth and home. 
It’s the connecting link—whether miss¬ 
ing or no. 
Of course the shaggy cedar bark is 
the ideal, and unless there has been 
an overdemand for railroad ties in your 
neighborhood, you are likely to be 
able to corral all the cedar you need 
for porch-posts—and possibly the rail¬ 
ing. Other material you will need is 
a load of white pine or spruce slab 
lumber from your nearest sawmill if 
possible. In lieu of this commercially 
worthless stuff, you will have to put 
up with a better and far less artistic 
{Continued on page 110) 
