rry at a time,
to lay in this enormous supply!

Within the chimneys were the wooden nests of chimney swifts, glued
firmly to the bricks; under the cornice was the paper home of a
community of yellow hornets; and under the floor where was no
cellar, right next the base of the warm chimney, were apartments
that had been occupied by generations of skunks. Each space
between floor joists and timber was a room. In one was a huge
clean nest of dried grass, much like that which red squirrels
build of cedar bark. Another space had been the larder, for it was
full of dry bones and feathers; others were for other uses, all
showing plainly the careful housekeeping of the family in the
basement.

I looked long and carefully, as the work of destruction went on,
for the pot of gold beneath the floor, or the secret hoard which
fancy assigns to all old houses; but not even a stray penny turned
up. Yet I got several souvenirs. One of these is a nail in my foot
whereby I shall remember my iconoclasm for some time. Another is a
curiously wrought wooden scoop, a sort of butter-worker, the
historian tells me, carved, seemingly, with a jackknife from a
pine plank. A third is a quaint, lumbering, heavy, hand-wrought
fire shovel which appeared somewhat curiously. Reentering a room
which I had cleared of everything movable, I found it standing
against the door-jamb. Fire-shovels have no legs, so I suppose it
was brought in. However, none of the neighbors has confessed, and
I am content to think it belonged in the old house and was brought
back, perhaps by the Baptist deacon who "backslided" and became a
Millerite. It has been rusted by water and burned by fire, and I
don't believe even Sherlock Holmes could make a wiser deduction.

As I write, a section of one of the old "Wheeler" cap-posts is
crumbling to ashes in my fireplace. It was of solid oak, of a
texture as firm and grainless almost as soapstone. No water had
touched this wood, I know, for a hundred and fifty years, perhaps
for almost a hundred added to that. For hours it retained its
shape, glowing like a huge block of anthracite, and sending forth
a heat as great but infinitely more kindly and comforting. Toward
the last the flames which came from it lost their yellow
opaqueness and slipped fluttering upward in a transparent
opalescence which I never before saw in fire. It was as if the
soul of the old house, made out of all that was beautiful and
kindly in the hopes and longing