undo all the evil spells they had cast on people, and so many
other wonderful stories would there be in a Beech tree's history.

12

TEARING-DOWN SENTIMENT

It was mid-fall. Now, with the tiling, planting, stone study and stable,
the installation of water and trees and payments on the land, I
concluded that I might begin on that winter and summer dream of a
house--in about Nineteen Hundred and Twenty-three.... But I had been
seeing it too clearly. So clear a thought literally draws the particles
of matter together. A stranger happened along and said:

"When I get tired and discouraged again, I'm coming out here and take
another look at your little stone study."

I asked him in. He was eager to know who designed the shop. I told him
that the different city attics I had worked in were responsible. He
found this interesting. Finally I told him about the dream that I hoped
some time to come true out yonder among the baby elms--the old father
fireplace and all its young relations, the broad porches and the nine
stone piers, the bedrooms strung on a balcony under a roof of glass,
the brick-paved _patio_ below and the fountain in the centre.... As he
was a very good listener, I took another breath and finished the
picture--to the sleeping porch that would overhang the bluff,
casement-windows, red tiles that would dip down over the stone-work,
even to the bins for potatoes and apples in the basement.

"That's very good," he said. "I'm an architect of Chicago. I believe I
can frame it up for you."

When a thing happens like that, I invariably draw the suspicion that it
was intended to be so. Anyway, I had to have plans.... When they came
from Chicago, I shoved the date of building ahead to Nineteen-Thirty,
and turned with a sigh to the typewriter.... Several days afterward
there was a tap at the study door in the drowsiest part of the
afternoon. A contractor and his friend, the lumberman, were interested
to know if I contemplated building. Very positively I said not--so
positively that the subject was changed. The next day I met the
contractor, who said he was sorry to hear of my decision, since the
lumberman had come with the idea of financing the stone house, but was a
bit delicate about it, the way I spoke.

This was information of the most obtruding sort.... One of my
well-trusted friends once said to me, looking up from a work-bench in
his own cellar:

"When I started to build I went in debt just as far a