wishes I heard Alice express during our
honeymoon was that we should sometime be rich enough to be able to build
a dear little house for ourselves. We were poor, of course; otherwise
our air castle would not have been "a dear little house"; it would have
been a palatial residence with a dance-hall at the top and a wine-cellar
at the bottom thereof. I have always observed that when the money comes
in the poetry flies out. Bread and cheese and kisses are all well enough
for poverty-stricken romance, but as soon as a poor man receives a
windfall his thoughts turn inevitably to a contemplation of the
probability of terrapin and canvasbacks.

I encouraged Alice in her fond day-dreaming, and we decided between us
that the dear little house should be a cottage, about which the roses and
the honeysuckles should clamber in summer, and which in winter should be
banked up with straw and leaves, for Alice and I were both of New England
origin. I must confess that we had some reason for indulging these
pleasing speculations, for at that time my Aunt Susan was living, and she
was reputed as rich as mud (whatever that may mean), and this simile was
by her neighbors coupled with another, which represented Aunt Susan as
being as close as a clapboard on a house. Whatever her reputation was, I
happened to be Aunt Susan's nearest of kin, and although I never so far
lost my presence of mind as to intimate even indirectly that I had any
expectations, I wrote regularly to Aunt Susan once a month, and every
fall I sent her a box of game, which I told her I had shot in the woods
near our boarding-house, but which actually I had bought of a commission
merchant in South Water Street.

With the legacy which we were to receive from Aunt Susan, Alice and I had
it all fixed up that we should build a cottage like one which Alice had
seen one time at Sweet Springs while convalescing at that fashionable
Missouri watering-place from an attack of the jaundice. This cottage
was, as I was informed, an ingenious combination of Gothic decadence and
Norman renaissance architecture. Being somewhat of an antiquarian by
nature, I was gratified by the promise of archaism which Alice's picture
of our future home presented. We picked out a corner lot in,--well, no
matter where; that delectable dream, with its Gothic and Norman features,
came to an untimely end all too soon. At its very height Aunt Susan up
and died, and a fortnight later we learned that, af