ng from the ground. The top of the
ventilator should be protected by slats, as in Fig. 161, or by wire
netting with about one-quarter-inch mesh in order to keep small animals
from jumping or hopping down into your club-house. Of course, a few toads
and frogs, field-mice and chipmunks, or even some lizards and harmless
snakes would not frighten any real boy, but at the same time they do not
want any such creatures living in the same house with them.

Trap-Door

In place of a ventilator or chimney a trap-door may be placed in the roof
and used as a secret entrance, access to inside being had by a ladder. A
description of an appropriate ladder follows (Figs. 169 and 170).

Fig. 159 shows a rude way to make a chandelier, and as long as your
candles burn brightly you may know that the air in your little hogan is
pure and fresh. When such a chandelier is used pieces of tin should be
nailed above the candles to prevent the heat from burning holes through
the roof.

XXV

HOW TO CUT AND NOTCH LOGS

BOYS you have now passed through the _grammar school_ of shack making, you
are older than you were when you began, you have acquired more skill and
more muscle, and it is time to begin to handle the woodsman's axe, to
handle it skilfully and to use it as a tool with which to fashion anything
from a table to a two-story house. None of you is too young to learn to
use the axe. General Grant, George Washington, Abraham Lincoln, Billy
Sunday--all of them could wield an axe by the time they were eight or nine
years old and do it without chopping off their toes or splitting any one
else's head open. Remember that every time you hurt yourself with an axe I
have a yellow ribbon for you to wear as a "chump mark"; but, joking aside,
we must now get down to serious work of preparing the logs in order to
build us a little cabin of our own, a log club-house for our gang, or a
log camp for our troop of scouts.

Notching Logs

To make the logs hold together at the corners of our cabins it is
necessary to lock them in some manner, and the usual way is to notch them.
You may cut flat notches like those shown in Fig. 162 and this will hold
the logs together, as shown by 162 _E_ or you may only flatten the ends,
making the General Putnam joint shown in Fig. 163. This is called after
General Putnam because the log cabins at his old camp near my farm at
Redding, Conn., are made in this manner. Or you may use the Pike notch
which has