I began to look about me in the light that shone through the gleaming cracks. Swift shadows were chasing one another over the walls and ceiling, and I soon grew familiar with a room about twelve feet deep, and which extended the width of the cabin. The floor was bare, and was very damp with the Saturday's scrubbing, as were also the benches which reached all round the walls. Besides the stove, the only piece of furniture that the room contained was a heavy table, about four feet square, which stood close to the benches in one corner, and directly under the single window of the room, which was a small opening in the logs, fitted with four panes of glass. A rough wooden staircase led from the near corner through an opening in the ceiling to the loft; and a door was cut through the thin board partition which separates the lobby from the large room in the body of the cabin, where the men are fed, and where I am writing now. The logs that formed the outer walls of the room had been rough-hewn to a plane; and along these walls, on two sides of the room, was a line of nails, on which hung coats and hats and flannel shirts and overalls. On the partition-wall there was nailed a small mirror with a little shelf below, on which lay a comb. Near this were three wooden rollers, and over them as many towels, large and coarse and fresh from the wash. I found a dry spot on the bench near the stove, and shoving my pack under me, I sat down, facing the outer door, and awaited developments. It had grown quite dark Without. The young woman who met me at the kitchen-door now came in with a small oil-lamp, which she placed on the shelf near the mirror. I began to think that the men must all have left the camp for Sunday, and my spirits rose at the thought of an easy initiation into camp life. But I was soon roused from this revery by the sound of many footsteps approaching the cabin, and the deep, gruff voices of men. The wooden latch lifted, the heavy door swung open, and there came trooping in a crew of fifteen lumbermen, all dripping water from their hair and faces and hands, for they were fresh from the evening wash in the run. They went first to the towels, and then formed in line for their turns at the mirror, where the comb was passed from hand to hand. Fifteen pairs of wet, blinking eyes were fixed on me, and I was obliged to meet each searching gaze in turn. But when this ordeal was passed, I began to feel a little at my ease, for the men ignored me completely. The air with which they turned away from the inspection seemed to say: "There is something exceedingly irregular in there being in the camp so abnormal a specimen as this, but the way in which to treat the case, at least for the present, is to let it alone." It was precisely the manner of well-bred men toward, let us say, some inharmonious figure in their club, whose presence is for the moment unaccounted for.