Page:Six months in Kansas.djvu/53

Now we started out to see the cabin, which he said was but forty rods distant. The location is particularly pretty, on a rising mound, and looking down the river quite a distance. The cabin is fifteen feet square, and eleven feet high, giving room for quite a loft. The windows were cotton cloth ; and the door was made of a frame, with a cross-piece, covered with the same material, having quite an extensive wooden latch fastened to the cross-piece with a wooden pin, and lifted from the outside by a twisted string. The cabin is made by driving joists into the ground four feet apart, and nailing "oak shakes" outside, after the manner of clapboards at home. These shakes are split out with an axe, after the blocks are sawed the proper length. This oak is a hard and crooked wood ; and the shakes, as a matter of necessity, refrain from a very close embrace, leaving little scollops and curious bends, through which, in the night time, the stars can take a peep at us and we at them as well. There were six boards stretched across the middle of the room; and on one side a plank was fastened for a work bench. Overhead, as many more crooked, miserable-looking