ut and baked them dry, they paled to silver,
and the smooth, rain-worn grooves and hollows of the boards glistened
like a rifle barrel.

The sheds were, I am afraid, not very useful. One, they said, had been
built to hold ploughs, another for turkeys, another for ducks. One, the
only one that was hen-tight, we used for the incarceration of confirmed
"setters," and it thus gained the title of "Durance Vile." The rest were
nameless, the abode of cobwebs and rats and old grain-bags and stolen
nests and surprise broods of chickens, who dropped through cracks
between loose boards and had to be extracted by Jonathan with much
difficulty. Perhaps it was this that set him against them. At all
events, he decided that they must go. I protested faintly, trying to
think of some really sensible argument.

"But Durance Vile," I said. "We need that. Where shall we put the
setters?"

"No, we don't. That isn't the way to treat setters, anyway. They should
be cooped and fed on meat."

"I suppose you read that in one of those agricultural experiment station
pamphlets," I said.

Many things that I consider disasters on the farm can be traced to one
or another of these little pamphlets, and when a new one arrives I
regard it with resignation but without cordiality.

The sheds went, and I missed them. Possibly the hens missed them too.
They wandered thoughtfully about the barnyard, stepping rather higher
than usual, cocking their heads and regarding me with their red-rimmed
eyes as if they were cluckfully conjuring up old associations. Did they
remember Durance Vile? Perhaps, but probably not. For all their
philosophic airs and their attitudinizing, I know nobody who thinks less
than a hen, or, at all events, their thinking is contemplative rather
than practical.

Jonathan also surveyed the raw spot. But Jonathan's mind is practical
rather than contemplative.

"Just the place for a carriage-house," he remarked.

And the carriage-house was perpetrated. Perhaps a hundred years from now
it will have been assimilated, but at present it stands out absolutely
undigested in all its uncompromising newness of line and color. Its
ridgepole, its roof edges, its corners, look as if they had been drawn
with a ruler, where those of the old barn were sketched freehand. The
barn and the sheds had settled into the landscape, the carriage-house
cut into it.

Even Jonathan saw it. "We'll paint it the old-fashioned red to make it
more in keeping,"