Someone caught a big copperhead, one of the meanest of all poisonous snakes, and one which is quite rare here, fortunately, and for a time Father kept it in a barrel near Slabsides. Later he grew tired of it, but he had not the heart to kill it, his prisoner. "After keeping a thing shut up and watching it every day I can't go out and kill it in cold blood," he said in half apology for his act. He told the man who worked on the swamp to carry the snake, barrel and all, up among the rocks and let him go. The man, when out of sight, promptly killed the snake. It seems to me that they were both right and the snake, though innocent himself, had to suffer. It was about two miles to Slabsides, a good part of it through the woods, and some of it up a very steep hill. I can see Father starting off with his market basket on his arm, the basket as full of provisions and reading matter as his step was full of vigour. I'll admit he did often raid Mother's pantry, and he was not averse to taking pie and cake. In fact, he was brought up on cake largely, and always ate of it freely until these last years. "His folks," as Mother would say, always had at least three kinds of cake three times a day, and then more cake the last thing before going to bed. At Slabsides most of the cooking was done over the open fire--potatoes and onions baked in the ashes, lamb chops broiled over the coals, peas fresh from the garden--how Father did enjoy it all--the sweetness of things! He would hum: "He lived all alone, close to the bone Where the meat is sweetest, he constantly eatest," and he liked to think of this old rhyme as applying to himself. The interior of Slabsides was finished in birch and beech poles, with the bark on them, and much of the furniture he made of natural crooks and crotches. He always had his "eye peeled," as he said, for some natural piece of wood that he could use. The bittersweet has a way of winding itself about some sapling, and as the two grow it puts a mark about the tree that makes it look as though it were twisted. One such piece, a small hemlock, is over the fireplace, and Father would tell how he told the girls who visited Slabsides that he and the hired man twisted this stick by hand. "We told them we took it when it was green," he would laugh, as he told the story, "and twisted it as you see it, then fastened it and it dried or seasoned that way--and they believed it!" and he would chuckle over it mightily. In 1913, Father was able, with the help of a friend, to buy the old homestead at Roxbury, and then he developed one of the farmhouses there, one built long ago by his brother Curtis, and thus made the third landmark in his life, any one of which was enough to occupy the time and care of one man. He called it Woodchuck Lodge, and the last years of his life were spent largely there, going out in June and returning in October.