There were two pots and a fry-pan at the hearth, and more in the niches.

It was such an extraordinary contraption that it took Anna a while to look away from it and survey the rest of the room.

Unlike the Jones’s clapboard house, where you could see light coming in through tiny spaces between the boards, the logs were chinked so tightly and expertly there was no chance of a draft once you closed the doors and the solid shutters over the windows. There were two windows in the wall behind her, with the front door between them, two windows in the wall to her right, and two and a door in the wall to her left. There were two lofts with ladders going up, one above the front door, the other above the fireplace, and she thought she saw a hint of a window up in the wall of the loft above the fireplace. Running under the one window to the right of the door was a counter with a sink in it, and beneath the counter, shelves laden with pots and jars and a few full or mostly full sacks. Above the counter, more shelves, one with a few books on it. At the end of the counter against the right wall was a huge cupboard. In front of the fireplace was a small table and a pair of stools atop a rag rug. The rest of the cabin held another huge cupboard, shelves loaded with bags, baskets, pots, jars, and rough boxes, another two chairs made of small, peeled logs, and a bed made of the same peeled logs. And that made Anna stare as well; she had never seen furniture made of logs before. Especially a bed. The well-off had fancy brass beds with wool mattresses. The not-so-well-off had iron beds with straw mattresses. Those just getting by had box beds made of whatever planks they could find and a corn-shuck mattress. The Joneses had an iron bed and a straw mattress with a trundle under it that her Pa had made with another straw mattress. The really poor slept on whatever they could find, piled up on the floor, sometimes contained within the confines of a rough plank bed. She didn’t know what to make of a log bed.

And there was food and bunches of drying plants everywhere: not only (presumably) in those bags and boxes and pots and jars, but hanging from peeled saplings tied up to the rafters. Sausages and hams, smoked meat she couldn’t identify, smoked fish. Onions in bunches. Potatoes in nets.

Before she could get over the shock of seeing such bounty, her aunt went over to the hearth and started frying something. There was the mouth-watering scent of bacon in the air. And when she turned back from the hearth, she had two plates in her hand, which she set on the little table. A moment later two bowls joined the plates. All four dishes were made of wood. So were the two cups she filled with liquid from a metal pitcher she took from one of the niches in the fireplace. “Set,” Aunt Jinny ordered.