our
furniture should be sent to us in the afternoon. We wanted to be there
to receive it. The trip was just wildly delirious. The air was charming.
The sun was bright, and I had a whole holiday. When we reached Ginx's we
found that the best way to get our trunks and ourselves to our house was
to take a carriage, and so we took one. I told the driver to drive along
the river road and I would tell him where to stop.

When we reached our boat, and had alighted, I said to the driver:

"You can just put our trunks inside, anywhere."

The man looked at the trunks and then looked at the boat. Afterward he
looked at me.

"That boat ain't goin' anywhere," said he.

"I should think not," said Euphemia. "We shouldn't want to live in it,
if it were."

"You are going to live in it?" said the man.

"Yes," said Euphemia.

"Oh!" said the man, and he took our trunks on board, without another
word.

It was not very easy for him to get the trunks into our new home.
In fact it was not easy for us to get there ourselves. There was a
gang-plank, with a rail on one side of it, which inclined from the shore
to the deck of the boat at an angle of forty-five degrees, and when the
man had staggered up this plank with the trunks (Euphemia said I ought
to have helped him, but I really thought that it would be better for one
person to fall off the plank than for two to go over together), and
we had paid him, and he had driven away in a speechless condition, we
scrambled up and stood upon the threshold, or, rather, the after-deck of
our home.

It was a proud moment. Euphemia glanced around, her eyes full of happy
tears, and then she took my arm and we went down stairs--at least we
tried to go down in that fashion, but soon found it necessary to go one
at a time. We wandered over the whole extent of our mansion and found
that our carpenter had done his work better than the woman whom we had
engaged to scrub and clean the house. Something akin to despair must
have seized upon her, for Euphemia declared that the floors looked
dirtier than on the occasion of her first visit, when we rented the
boat.

But that didn't discourage us. We felt sure that we should get it clean
in time.

Early in the afternoon our furniture arrived, together with the other
things we had bought, and the men who brought them over from the
steamboat landing had the brightest, merriest faces I ever noticed among
that class of people. Euphemia said it was an excell