and their grandsire shall eat Thanksgiving dinner in the
rebuilt dining-room," was my secret sentimental resolution. "To do that
will turn a wail into a song--a disaster into a poem."

All very foolish, you say. No doubt, but it interested me and I was of
an age when very few things interested me vitally. With clothing black
as soot, with hands brown with stain and skinned and swollen and
feverish, I kept to my job without regard to Sundays or the ordinary
hours of labor. I was not seeking sympathy,--I was renewing my youth. I
was both artist and workman. My muscles hardened, my palms broadened, my
appetite became prodigious. I lost all fear of indigestion and ate
anything which my friend Dudley was good enough to provide. I even drank
coffee at every opportunity, and went so far as to eat doughnuts and
pancakes at breakfast! To be deliciously hungry as of old was
heartening.

The weather continued merciful. Each day the sun rose red and genial,
and at noon the warm haze of Indian summer trailed along the
hills--though I had little time in which to enjoy it. Each sunset marked
a new stanza in my poem, a completed phrase, a recovered figure. "Our
small affairs have shut out the light of the sun," I said to father,
"the political situation has lost all interest for me."

Bare, clean and sweet, the library and music-room at last were ready for
furniture. All these must be replaced. A hurried trip to the city, three
days of determined shopping with Zulime, and a stream of new goods
(necessary to refurnish), began to set toward the threshold. The draymen
plied busily between the station and the gate.

By November first my father and I were camping in the library and
cooking our own food in the dining-room. We rose each day before dawn
and ate our bacon and coffee while yet the stars twinkled in the west,
and both of us were reminded of the frosty mornings on our Iowa farm,
when we used to eat by candle-light in order to husk corn by starlight.
My hands felt as they used to feel when, worn by the rasping husks, they
burned with fever. Heavy as hams, they refused to hold a pen, and my
mind refused to compose even letters--but the pen was not needed. "My
poem is composed of wood and steel," I remarked to Dudley.

At last the yard was cleared of its charred rubbish, the porch restored
to its old foundation, and the new metal roof, broad-spreading and
hospitable, gleamed like snow in dusk and dawn, and from the uncurtained
w