e by first cutting off the timber. The stumps were left to dot the
fields of grain and Indian corn. The corn in especial was the stand-by
and invariable resource of the western settler; it was the crop on which
he relied to feed his family, and when hunting or on a war trail the
parched grains were carried in his leather wallet to serve often as his
only food. But he planted orchards and raised melons, potatoes, and many
other fruits and vegetables as well; and he had usually a horse or two,
cows, and perhaps hogs and sheep, if the wolves and bears did not
interfere. If he was poor his cabin was made of unhewn logs, and held
but a single room; if well-to-do, the logs were neatly hewed, and
besides the large living- and eating-room with its huge stone fireplace,
there was also a small bedroom and a kitchen, while a ladder led to the
loft above, in which the boys slept. The floor was made of puncheons,
great slabs of wood hewed carefully out, and the roof of clapboards.
Pegs of wood were thrust into the sides of the house, to serve instead
of a wardrobe; and buck antlers, thrust into joists, held the ever-ready
rifles. The table was a great clapboard set on four wooden legs; there
were three-legged stools, and in the better sort of houses old-fashioned
rocking-chairs.[20] The couch or bed was warmly covered with blankets,
bear-skins, and deer-hides.[21]

These clearings lay far apart from one another in the wilderness. Up to
the door-sills of the log-huts stretched the solemn and mysterious
forest. There were no openings to break its continuity; nothing but
endless leagues on leagues of shadowy, wolf-haunted woodland. The great
trees towered aloft till their separate heads were lost in the mass of
foliage above, and the rank underbrush choked the spaces between the
trunks. On the higher peaks and ridge-crests of the mountains there were
straggling birches and pines, hemlocks and balsam firs;[22] elsewhere,
oaks, chestnuts, hickories, maples, beeches, walnuts, and great tulip
trees grew side by side with many other kinds. The sunlight could not
penetrate the roofed archway of murmuring leaves; through the gray
aisles of the forest men walked always in a kind of mid-day gloaming.
Those who had lived in the open plains felt when they came to the
backwoods as if their heads were hooded. Save on the border of a lake,
from a cliff top, or on a bald knob--that is, a bare hill-shoulder,--they
could not anywhere look out for any di