It was a
potato-hole with a permanent roof. Each structure and institution here was
so primitive that you could at once refer it to its source; but our
buildings commonly suggest neither their origin nor their purpose. There
was a large, and what farmers would call handsome, barn, part of whose
boards had been sawed by a whip-saw; and the saw-pit, with its great pile
of dust, remained before the house. The long split shingles on a portion
of the barn were laid a foot to the weather, suggesting what kind of
weather they have there. Grant's barn at Caribou Lake was said to be still
larger, the biggest ox-nest in the woods, fifty feet by a hundred. Think
of a monster barn in that primitive forest lifting its gray back above the
tree-tops! Man makes very much such a nest for his domestic animals, of
withered grass and fodder, as the squirrels and many other wild creatures
do for themselves.
There was also a blacksmith's shop, where plainly a good deal of work was
done. The oxen and horses used in lumbering operations were shod, and all
the iron-work of sleds, etc., was repaired or made here. I saw them load a
_bateau_ at the Moosehead carry, the next Tuesday, with about thirteen
hundred weight of bar iron for this shop. This reminded me how primitive
and honorable a trade was Vulcan's.
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