Page:Letters from an Oregon Ranch.djvu/59

 no less witching ones. Nature in making this mountain region dealt out grandeur and beauty with a lavish hand. I cannot say as much for man’s work, for surely here are the ugliest buildings that ever blotted and disfigured a landscape. Rickety, weather-beaten, and boarded up and down, they are so irredeemably ugly that one longs to sweep them off the face of the earth. There are two buildings, however, made of logs, that I would spare, as they seem to fit in with their rugged surroundings. One is a big, wide, roomy barn; the other a “root-house.” I had never seen or heard of such a thing before, and inquiring of the lord of the manor what it was for, I was told that “it was a place to root in when you feel like it,”—an evasive reply, which proved to me that he knew no more about it than I did. This building, hidden by climbing vines and green moss, is picturesque as an old ruin; only it is no ruin,—it is good for a century yet.

The fences on the place are of rails, which would be all right and appropriate if only they were good rails; but, alas! the storms and stress of the seasons have borne so heavily upon them that they have mostly given up trying to be fences, and have lain down in discouraged and straggling heaps along the boundary lines. We are told that this ranch was well kept up by its former owners when they were living here, but since then has been sadly misused and abused by tenants. It now, I fancy, resembles the “abandoned farms” of the