that
comes with new, and a bit of plasterers' work inside to make good.
Testimony was current in and about the house to this effect, and may be
given broadly in the terms in which it reached Uncle Moses. His comment
was that the building trade was a bad lot, mostly; you had only to take
your eye off it half a minute, and it was round at the nearest bar
trying the four-half. Mr. Jerry's experience had been the same.

Mrs. Burr was out all day, most of the time; so it didn't matter to her.
But it was another thing for the old woman, sometimes alone for hours
together; alone with her past. At such times her sleeping or waking
dreams mixed with the talk of the bricklayers outside, or the sound of a
piano from one of the superior houses that back-wall screened the Court
from--though they had no call to give theirselves airs that the Court
could see--a piano on which talent was playing scales with both hands,
but which wanted tuning. Old Mrs. Prichard was not sensitive about a
little discord now and again. As she sat there alone, knitting worsteds
or dozing, it brought back old times to her, before her troubles began.
She and her sister could both play easy tunes, such as the "Harmonious
Blacksmith" and the "Evening Hymn," on the square piano she still
remembered so well at the Mill. And this modern piano--heard through
open windows in the warm summer air, and mixing with the
indistinguishable sounds of distant traffic--had something of the effect
of that instrument of seventy years ago, breaking the steady monotone of
rushing waters under the wheel that scarcely ever paused, except on
Sunday. What had become of the old square piano she and Phoebe learned
to play scales on? What becomes of all the old furnishings of the rooms
of our childhood? Did any man ever identify the bed he slept in, the
table he ate at, half a century ago, in the chance-medley of
second-hand--third-hand--furniture his father's insolvency or his own
consigned it to? Would she know the old square piano again now, with all
its resonances dead--a poor, faint jargon only in some few scattered
wires, far apart? Yes--she would know it among a hundred, by the inlaid
bay-leaves on the lid that you could lift up to look inside. But that
was accounted lawless, and forbidden by authority.

She dreamed herself back into the old time, and could see it all. The
sound of the piano became mixed, as she sat half dozing, with the smell
of the lilies of the valley which