The greatest inconvenience I experienced, was from the necessity of wearing my straw bonnet throughout the day, as I journeyed from bedroom to parlor, and from parlor to kitchen.

I became so accustomed to it that I even sometimes forgot to remove it when I sat down to table, or to my quiet occupations with my mother and sister.
Permission was, however, in time, received to build a house for the blacksmith--that is, the person kept in pay by the Government at this station to mend the guns, traps, etc.

of the Indians.
It happened most fortunately for us that Monsieur Isidore Morrin was a bachelor, and quite satisfied to continue boarding with his friend Louis Frum, _dit_ Manaigre, so that when the new house was fairly commenced we planned it and hurried it forward entirely on our own account.
It was not very magnificent, it is true, consisting of but a parlor and two bedrooms on the ground-floor, and two low chambers under the roof, with a kitchen in the rear; but compared with the rambling old stable-like building we now inhabited, it seemed quite a palace.
Before it was completed, Mr.Kinzie was notified that the money for the annual Indian payment was awaiting his arrival in Detroit to take it in charge and superintend its transportation to the Portage; and he was obliged to set off at once to fulfil this part of his duty.
The workmen who had been brought from the Mississippi to erect the main building, were fully competent to carry on their work without an overseer; but the kitchen was to be the task of the Frenchmen, and the question was, how could it be executed in the absence of the _bourgeois_?
"You will have to content yourselves in the old quarters until my return," said my husband, "and then we will soon have things in order." His journey was to be a long and tedious one, for the operations of Government were not carried on by railroad and telegraph in those days.
After his departure I said to the men, "Come, you have all your logs cut and hauled--the squaws have brought the bark for the roof--what is to prevent our finishing the house and getting all moved and settled to surprise Monsieur John on his return ?" "Ah! to be sure, Madame John," said Plante, who was always the spokesman, "provided the one who plants a green bough on the chimney-top is to have a treat." "Certainly.

All hands fall to work, and see who will win the treat." Upon the strength of such an inducement to the one who should put the finishing stroke to the building, Plante, Pillon, and Manaigre, whom the waggish Plante persisted in calling "mon negre," whenever he felt himself out of the reach of the other's arm, all went vigorously to work.
Building a log house is a somewhat curious process.

First, as will be conceived, the logs are laid one upon another and jointed at the corners, until the walls have reached the required height.