BOYS you have now passed through the _grammar school_ of shack making, you
are older than you were when you began, you have acquired more skill and
more muscle, and it is time to begin to handle the woodsman's axe, to
handle it skilfully and to use it as a tool with which to fashion anything
from a table to a two-story house. None of you is too young to learn to
use the axe. General Grant, George Washington, Abraham Lincoln, Billy
Sunday--all of them could wield an axe by the time they were eight or nine
years old and do it without chopping off their toes or splitting any one
else's head open. Remember that every time you hurt yourself with an axe I
have a yellow ribbon for you to wear as a "chump mark"; but, joking aside,
we must now get down to serious work of preparing the logs in order to
build us a little cabin of our own, a log club-house for our gang, or a
log camp for our troop of scouts.