The house at Pine Knot consists of one long room, with a broad piazza, below, and three small bedrooms above. It is made of wood, with big outside chimneys at each end. Wood rats and white-footed mice visit it; once a weasel came in after them; now a flying squirrel has made his home among the rafters. On one side the pines and on the other side the oaks come up to the walls; in front the broom sedge grows almost to the piazza and above the line of its waving plumes we look across the beautiful rolling Virginia farm country to the foothills of the Blue Ridge. At night whippoorwills call incessantly around us. In the late spring or early summer we usually take breakfast and dinner on the veranda listening to mocking-bird, cardinal, and Carolina wren, as well as to many more common singers. In the winter the little house can only be kept warm by roaring fires in the great open fireplaces, for there is no plaster on the walls, nothing but the bare wood. Then the table is set near the blazing logs at one end of the long room which makes up the lower part of the house, and at the other end the colored cook—Jim Crack by name—prepares the delicious Virginia dinner; while around him cluster the little darkies, who go on errands, bring in wood, or fetch water from the spring, to put in the bucket which stands below where the gourd hangs on the wall. Outside the wind moans or the still cold bites if the night is quiet; but inside there is warmth and light and cheer. There are plenty of quail and rabbits in the fields and woods near by, so we live partly on what our guns bring in; and there are also wild turkeys. I spent the first three days of November, 1906, in a finally successful effort to kill a wild turkey. Each morning I left the house between three and five o’clock, under a cold brilliant moon. The frost was heavy; and my horse shuffled over the frozen ruts as I rode after Dick. I was on the turkey grounds before the faintest streak of dawn had appeared in the east; and I worked as long as daylight lasted. It was interesting and attractive in spite of the cold. In the night we heard the quavering screech owls; and occasionally the hooting of one of their bigger brothers. At dawn we listened to the lusty hammering of the big logcocks, or to the curious coughing or croaking sound of a hawk before it left its roost. Now and then loose flocks of small birds straggled past us as we sat in the blind, or rested to eat our lunch; chickadees, tufted tits, golden-crested kinglets, creepers, cardinals, various sparrows and small woodpeckers. Once we saw a shrike pounce on a field mouse by a haystack; once we came on a ruffed grouse sitting motionless in the road. [Illustration: ROSWELL BEHAVES LIKE A GENTLEMAN From a photograph, copyright, 1907, by Clinedinst ]