ld house, and also with some that are not.
What seemed most to the purpose was a rusty key which had been thrust
into a chink of the wall, with a wooden label appended to the handle,
bearing the initials "P.G." Another singular discovery was that of a
bottle of wine walled up in an old oven. A tradition ran in the family
that Peter's grandfather, a jovial officer in the old French war, had
set aside many dozens of the precious liquor for the benefit of topers
then unborn. Peter needed no cordial to sustain his hopes, and
therefore kept the wine to gladden his success. Many half-pence did he
pick up that had been lost through the cracks of the floor, and some
few Spanish coins, and the half of a broken sixpence which had
doubtless been a love-token. There was likewise a silver coronation
medal of George III. But old Peter Goldthwaite's strong-box fled from
one dark corner to another, or otherwise eluded the second Peter's
clutches till, should he seek much farther, he must burrow into the
earth.

We will not follow him in his triumphant progress step by step.
Suffice it that Peter worked like a steam-engine and finished in that
one winter the job which all the former inhabitants of the house, with
time and the elements to aid them, had only half done in a century.
Except the kitchen, every room and chamber was now gutted. The house
was nothing but a shell, the apparition of a house, as unreal as the
painted edifices of a theatre. It was like the perfect rind of a great
cheese in which a mouse had dwelt and nibbled till it was a cheese no
more. And Peter was the mouse.

What Peter had torn down, Tabitha had burnt up, for she wisely
considered that without a house they should need no wood to warm it,
and therefore economy was nonsense. Thus the whole house might be said
to have dissolved in smoke and flown up among the clouds through the
great black flue of the kitchen chimney. It was an admirable parallel
to the feat of the man who jumped down his own throat.

On the night between the last day of winter and the first of spring
every chink and cranny had been ransacked except within the precincts
of the kitchen. This fated evening was an ugly one. A snow-storm had
set in some hours before, and was still driven and tossed about the
atmosphere by a real hurricane which fought against the house as if
the prince of the air in person were putting the final stroke to
Peter's labors. The framework being so much weakened and th