hold of it, so I
fear there is no exposed scrap of it to-day. It is all there under the
shingles, and will still be there for other shingles when those are
gone. The nails that held it were made by hand, every one of them, and I
did save some of those, for they were really beautiful. But think of the
patient labor of making them. I suppose a skilled and rapid workman
could turn out as many as twenty of those nails in an hour. A detail
like that gives one a sort of measurement of those deliberate days.

We did not always agree as to our improvements. I don t think our
arguments ever became heated--one might characterize them as, well,
ardent. If Elizabeth thought my ideas sometimes wild, not to say crazy,
I don t remember that she ever put it just in that way. If I thought
hers inclined to be prosaic and earthy, I was careful to be out of range
and hearing before I expressed myself. I remember once suggesting that
we do our cooking and heating entirely in the old way--that is to say,
using the fireplaces and the Dutch oven--and was pained to find that
Elizabeth was contemplating a furnace and a kitchen range. She asked me
rather pointedly who I thought was going to get in wood enough to keep
four fireplaces running, and if I fancied the idea of going to bed in
the big north room up-stairs with the thermometer shrinking below zero.

It was still August at the moment, and the prospect was not so
disturbing. I said that hardy races always did those things, that the
old builders of this house had probably not minded it at all, and just
see to what great old ages they had lived. I said that as a child I had
even done it myself.

"So did I," said Elizabeth; "that is why I am not going to do it now."

She walked out with quite a firm step, and I did not pursue the matter.
I might have done so, but I had a vision, just then, of a boy who had
lived on the Western prairies, in a big box of a house, and had gone to
bed in a room that was about the temperature of the snow-drifted yard. I
could see him madly flinging off a few outer garments, making a spring
into a bed that was like a frozen pond, lying there in a bunch, getting
tolerably warm at last, but all night long fearful of moving an inch
because of his frigid boundaries. As for the matter of wood, well, I had
carried that, too, cords of it, for a fireplace that had devoured it
relentlessly and given nothing adequate in return. I recalled that in
cold weather I had never k