oors from
one to two inches wide. At both the doors we had high, unsteady, and
sometimes icy steps, made by piling the logs cut out of the walls, for
the doors and the window, if it could be called a window, when perhaps
it was the largest spot in the top, bottom, or sides of the cabin where
the wind could not enter. It was made by sawing out a log, and placing
sticks across, and then by pasting an old newspaper over the hole,
and applying hog's lard, we had a kind of glazing which shed a most
beautiful and mellow light across the cabin when the sun shone on it.
All other light entered at the doors, cracks, and chimneys. Our cabin
was twenty-four by eighteen. The west end was occupied by two beds, the
center of each side by a door.... On the opposite side of the window,
made of clapboards, supported on pins driven into the walls, were our
shelves. On these shelves my sister displayed in simple order, a host of
pewter plates, and dishes and spoons, scoured and bright.... Our chimney
occupied most of the east end; with pots and kettles opposite the
window, under the shelves, a gun on hooks over the north door, four
split-bottomed chairs, three three-legged stools, and a small eight
by ten looking glass sloped from the wall over a large towel and comb
case.... We got a roof laid over head as soon as possible, but it was
laid of loose clapboards split from a red-oak, and a cat might have
shaken every board in our ceiling.... We made two kinds of furniture.
One kind was of hickory bark, with the outside shaved off. This we would
take off all around the tree, the size of which would determine the
caliber of our box. Into one end we would place a flat piece of bark or
puncheon, cut round to fit in the bark, which stood on end the same
as when on the tree.... A much finer article was made of slippery-elm
bark, shaved smooth, with the inside out, bent round and sewed together,
where the end of the hoop or main bark lapped over.... This was the
finest furniture in a lady's dressing room," and such a cabin and its
appointments were splendor and luxury beside those of the very earliest
pioneers, and many of the latest. The Williamses were Quakers, and the
mother was recently from England; they were of far gentler breeding and
finer tastes than most of their neighbors, who had been backwoodsmen for
generations.

When the first settlers broke the silence of the woods with the stroke
of their axes, and hewed out a space for their cabi