Woodsmoke From Old Cabins

"I don't feel very good lookin'?but I know I am."

Pop's face is as sound and long as an ax handle, and it has enough wrinkles to hold a week's rain. I learned how to use an ax from watching Pop, but even today?at 72?he can cover me with chips and consternation.

He showed me everything I know about using edged tools and scribing a board to fit around the intricate curves of a log-cabin wall. All the time we were building our home cabin I thought of Pop and was beholden to him. One of the greatest compliments I ever had was last September when Pop visited us and saw our cabin for the first time. He took up a level and rule and laid them all over the place. Then he looked at me sorrowfully, and said:

"You're a quarter of an inch out."

Suddenly tears showed in his pale blue eyes; and, speaking as though for my wife and me, almost as if we were his children, he came out astonishingly with a quotation he must have learned 60 years ago in the church of some tiny, wood-burning hamlet in his native Maine. It was from The Song of Solomon.

"Behold, Thou are fair, my beloved, yea pleasant; also our bed is green. The beams of our house are of cedar, and our rafters of fir."