When people speak of "love in a cottage," there rises nearly always, in my mind, the memory of a log house that a friend of mine and I came across by the headwaters of a great river in Canada.

It stood—the axe marks crisp, white, and blistered with pitch—upon the brink of a swirling brown pool full of grilse. The logs of which it was built had been dragged from a distance, so that in the immediate neighborhood of the cabin was no desolation of dead tree-tops and dying stumps. Everything was wonderfully neat, new, and in order. About the pool and the cabin the maples had turned yellow and vermilion. And above was the peaceful pale blue of an Indian-summer sky.

We opened the door, held by a simple latch, and found ourselves in the pleasantest of rooms, just twenty feet by fifteen. The walls and the floor had been much whitened and smoothed by the axe. The place smelt vaguely of pitch and strongly of balsam. There was a fireplace—the fire all laid, a bunk to lie on, a chair to sit on, a table to write on, a broom to sweep with. And neatly set upon clean shelves were various jams in glass, and meats, biscuits, and soups in tins. There was also a writing (on birch bark) over the shelves, which read: "Help yourself."

We took down the shutters from the windows and let in floods of autumn sun. Then we lighted the fire, and ate crackers and jam.

It hurt a little to learn at the mouth of our guide that the cabin belonged to a somewhat notorious and decidedly crotchety New York financier who controlled the salmon-fishing in those waters. I had pictured it as built for a pair of eminently sensible and supernaturally romantic honeymooners or for a poet. And I wanted to carry away that impression. For in such a place love or inspiration must have lasted just as long as the crackers and jam. And there is no more to be said of a palace.

One day Mary Darling and Sam Langham visited the new cabin. And Sam said: "If one of the happy pair happened to know something of cooking, what a place for a honeymoon!"

Shortly afterward, Phyllis and Herring came that way, and Herring said: "If I was in love, and knew how to use an axe, I'd build just such a house for the girl I love and make her live in it. I believe I will, anyway."

"Believe what?" asked Phyllis demurely. "Believe you will make her live in it?"

"Yes," he said darkly—"no matter who she is and no matter how afraid of the mice and spiders with which such places ultimately become infested."

Lee and Renier visited the cabin, also. They remarked only that it had a wonderfully smooth floor, and proceeded at once thereon, Lee whistling exquisitely and with much spirit, to dance a maxixe, which was greatly admired by the ex-outlaws.

Maud came often with the Carolinians, and as for Eve, she came once or twice all by herself.