She laughed pretty much as in patriarchal days Sara, laughed at the forecast of an equally unlikely occurrence.
After an interval she laughed again, but with no note of derision.
“I see it all now-all!” she cried. “You will be the Martin Luther of its Reformation: you will cut the half of it away; but will the Church stand when you have done with it?”
“Stronger than it ever was. I will hear the voice of no protestant against it,” I replied.
My scheme had become apparent to her in almost every particular as it had flashed upon me; and we began operations the very next day.
And this is what the operation amounted to—an Amputation.
When a limb has suffered such an injury as to make its recovery hopeless as well as a danger to the whole body, the saving grace of the surgeon's knife is resorted to, and the result is usually the rescue of the patient. Our resolution was to cut away the rotten parts of the roof of the greenhouse and convert the remainder, which was perfectly sound, into a peach-shelter; and within a couple of weeks the operation had been performed with what appeared to us to be complete success.
We removed the lower panes of glass without difficulty—the difficulty was to induce the others to remain under their bondage of ancient putty: “They don't make putty like that nowadays,” remarked my builder, who is also, in accordance with the dictation of a job like this, a housebreaker, a carpenter, and a glazier—a sort of unity of many tools that comes to our relief (very appropriately) from the United States.
