was fully eight feet long, and upon it was a heap of dark bed
clothing. There was a chair and a bench of colossal proportions.
There was an ordinary kitchen cupboard with a few cracked dirty
dishes in it, and beside it on a tall box a tin washbasin. Under
the bed was a pile of pint flasks, some broken, some whole,
all empty. On the wood box lay a pair of shoes of almost
incredible dimensions. On the wall hung a saddle, a gun, and
some ragged clothing, conspicuous among which was a suit of dark
cloth, apparently new, with a paper collar carefully wrapped in a
red silk handkerchief and pinned to the sleeve. Over the door hung
a wolf and a badger skin, and on the door itself a brace of thirty
or forty snake skins whose noisy tails rattled ominously every time
it opened. The strangest things in the shanty were the wide
windowsills. At first glance they looked as though they had been
ruthlessly hacked and mutilated with a hatchet, but on closer
inspection all the notches and holes in the wood took form and
shape. There seemed to be a series of pictures. They were, in a
rough way, artistic, but the figures were heavy and labored, as
though they had been cut very slowly and with very awkward
instruments. There were men plowing with little horned imps
sitting on their shoulders and on their horses' heads. There were
men praying with a skull hanging over their heads and little demons
behind them mocking their attitudes. There were men fighting with
big serpents, and skeletons dancing together. All about these
pictures were blooming vines and foliage such as never grew in this
world, and coiled among the branches of the vines there was always
the scaly body of a serpent, and behind every flower there was a
serpent's head. It was a veritable Dance of Death by one who had
felt its sting. In the wood box lay some boards, and every inch of
them was cut up in the same manner. Sometimes the work was very