"Roll on, Silver Moon,
Guide the traveler on his way."
That was always a sure sign that he was getting interested in some scheme.
Then things began to move in earnest. Two carpenters appeared and laid the sills for an addition to the house, twenty feet long by eighteen feet wide, just behind the kitchen, which was in the L. The room that they built had a door opening directly into the kitchen. The floor, I remember, was of maple and the walls of matched spruce.
Meanwhile the old Squire had had a sewer dug about three hundred feet long; and to hold the water supply he built a tank of about a thousand gallons' capacity, made of pine planks; the tank was in the attic directly over the kitchen stove, so that in winter heat would rise under it through a little scuttle in the floor and prevent the water from freezing.
From the tank the pipes that led to the new bathroom ran down close to the chimney and the stove pipe. Those bathroom pipes gave the old Squire much anxiety; there was not a plumber in town; the old gentleman had to do the work himself, with the help of a hardware dealer from the village, six miles away.
But if the pipe gave him anxiety, the bathtub gave him more. When he inquired at Portland about their cost, he was somewhat staggered to learn that the price of a regular tub was fifty-eight dollars.
But the old Squire had an inventive brain. He drove up to the mill, selected a large, sound pine log about four feet in diameter and set old Davy Glinds, a brother of Hughy Glinds, to excavate a tub from it with an adze. In his younger days Davy Glinds had been a ship carpenter, and was skilled in the use of the broadaxe and the adze. He fashioned a good-looking tub, five feet long by two and a half wide, smooth hewn within and without. When painted white the tub presented a very creditable appearance.
The old Squire was so pleased with it that he had Glinds make another; and then, discovering how cheaply pine bathtubs could be made, he hit upon a new notion. The more he studied on a thing like that, the more the subject unfolded in his dear old head. Why, the old Squire asked himself, need the Saturday-night bath occupy a whole evening because the eight or ten members of the family had to take turns in one tub, when we could just as well have more tubs?
Before grandmother Ruth fairly realized what he was about, the old gentleman had five of these pine tubs ranged there in the new lean-to. He had the carpenters inclose each tub within a sealed partition of spruce boards. There was thus formed a little hall five feet wide in the center of the new bathroom, from which small doors opened to each tub.
"What do you mean, Joseph, by so many tubs?" grandmother cried in astonishment, when she discovered what he was doing.