this done, he calls it a day and goes home to teach his little son Elmer, who expects to follow in the paternal footsteps, the rudiments of the art of filing a saw without being in too much of a hurry about it, which after all is the main point in this department of the carpentering profession. 

 And the next day the plumber remembers where he left his sack of smoking tobacco, or the steam fitter's attention is directed to the fact that when he stuck in the big pipe like a bass tuba he forgot to insert alongside it the little pipe like a piccolo, and therefore it becomes necessary to maltreat the already thrice-mangled remains of woodwork. A month or so later the plasterers arrive—they were due in a week, but a plasterer who showed up when he was expected or any time within a month after he had solemnly promised on his sacred word of honor that he meant to show up would have his card taken away from him and be put out of the union. Hours after Gabriel has blown his trump for the last call it is going to be incumbent upon the little angel bell hops to go and page the plasterers, else they won't get there for judgment at all. 

 Be that as it may and undoubtedly will be, in a month or so the plasterers arrive, wearing in streaks the same effects in laid-on complexion that so many of our leading débutantes are wearing all over their faces. The chief plasterer looks over the prospect and decides that in order to insure a smooth and unbroken surface for his plaster coat the plumbing and the heating connections must have their elbows tucked in a few notches, which ultimatum naturally requires the good offices of the carpenter, first to snatch out and afterward to hammer back into some sort of alignment the shreds and fragments of his original job. When this sort of thing, with variations, has gone on through a period of months, a house has become an intricate and complicated fabric of patchworks and mosaics held together, as nearly as a layman can figure, by the power of cohesion and the pressures of dead weights. The amazing part of it is that it stays put. I am quite sure that our house will stay put, because despite the vagaries—perhaps I should say the morbid curiosity—of various artificers intent on taking the poor thing apart every little while, it was constructed of materials which as humans compute mutabilities are reasonably permanent in their basic characters. 

 It was our desire to have a new house that would look like an old house; a yearning in which the architect heartily concurred, he having a distaste for the slick, shiny, look-out-for-the-paint look which is common enough in American country 

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