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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. The couch or bed was warmly covered with blankets, bear-skins, and deer-hides. 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.

We had now reached as far north as there would be any use in going, as my uncle and his party must have come by this time fully as far south as we then were if they had not already passed us. Though the country was almost in as wild a state as in the southern parts, there were a few log-huts and other primitive buildings scattered about; but the inhabitants had fled for fear of the Indians.

Primarily, in its Canadian and original sense, the term means a log-house a hut made of rough squared logs, built up upon each other. Such log-huts are not common in this country, though they may be seen here and there. The mild climate does not require such a style of building. The labour of cutting and squaring logs for the purpose is great.

It is unnecessary to enter here into the details of the early history of the Royal Institution. Its first years were years of struggle. The schools erected under its authority were one-room buildings of cedar logs. Indeed, they were mere log-huts, but they provided the first free English Education in Lower Canada, and laid the foundation for a Canadian nationality.

Within the log-huts sat the squaws of the party, all busily employed sewing beads on moccasins, or ornamenting deer-skin pouches, after the fashion of the dames of old in the absence of their true knights; our guide addressed these ladies roughly enough; but without eliciting any reply more encouraging than a sort of "Ugh! ugh!" unaccompanied by a single look.

A small party of settlers had reared their log-huts near the present site of Shelbyville. Squire Boone had been one of the prominent actors in the establishment of this little colony. Alarmed by the menaces of the savages, these few settlers decided to remove to a more secure station on Bear's Creek.

In 651 he made his way to a group of straw-thatched log-huts, in the midst of an untilled solitude, where a few Irish monks from Lindisfarne had settled in the mission-station of Melrose. To-day the land is a land of poetry and romance. Cheviot and Lammermoor, Ettrick and Teviotdale, Yarrow and Annan-water, are musical with old ballads and border minstrelsy.

There was not much schooling, and few boys or girls learnt much more than reading, writing, and ciphering up to the rule of three. Where the school-houses existed they were only dark, mean log-huts, and if in the southern colonies, were generally placed in the so-called "old fields," or abandoned farms grown up with pines.

Called by their consciences to self-denying labors, living simply, often half-supported by the toil of their own hands, they have let the light, such light as shone for them, into the minds of our communities as the settler's axe let the sunshine into their log-huts and farm-houses. Their work has not been confined to their professional duties, as a few instances will illustrate.

It was surrounded by a palisade of stout timbers, fixed deeply in the ground, and united by cross-bars, further strengthened by buttresses, and loop-holed for musketry, with a few light guns to sweep the fort should the enemy break in. The interior consisted of log-huts and storehouses. Such is the style of most of the fur-trading forts.