"What in the world," asked Mrs. Petter, regarding an object in her husband's hands, "made you take down that miserable, dilapidated little squirrel from the sign-post? You might as well have let him stay there all winter, and put up a new one in the spring."
"This has been a most memorable year," replied her husband, "and I wish to place this squirrel in his proper position on the calendar shelf of the tap-room before the storms and winds of winter have blown the fur from his body and every hair from his upturned tail. I have killed and prepared a fresh squirrel, and I will place him on the sign-post in a few days."
"If you would let that one stay until he was a skin skeleton, he would have given people a better idea of the way this year has turned out than he does now," said Mrs. Petter.
"How so?" he asked, looking at her in surprise.
"Don't we sit here stripped of every friendly voice?" she said. "Of course, it's always more lonesome in the winter, but it's never been so bad as this, for we haven't even Calthea to fall back on. Things didn't turn out as I expected them to, and I suppose they never will, but it always was my opinion, and is yet, that nothing can go straight in such a crooked house. This very afternoon, as I was coming from the poultry-yard, and saw Lanigan's ladder still standing up against the window of his room, I couldn't help thinking that if a burglar got into that room, he might suppose he was in the house; but he'd soon find himself greatly mistaken, and even if he went over the roof to Mr. Lodloe's room, all he could do would be to come down the tower stairs, and then he would find himself outside, just where he started from."
"That would suit me very well," remarked Mr. Petter.
"If this house had been built in a plain, straightforward way," his wife continued, "with a hall through the middle of it, and the rooms alike on both sides, then things might have happened in a straightforward way, and not all mixed up, as they were here this summer. Nobody could tell who was going to marry who, and why they should do it, if they ever did."
Mr. Petter arose and, still holding the stuffed squirrel in his hand, stood with his back to the fire.
"It strikes me, Susan," said he, looking reflectively in front of him, "that our lives are very seldom built with a hall through the middle and the rooms alike on both sides. I don't think we'd like it if they were. They would be stupid and humdrum. The right sort of a life should have its ups and downs, its ins and outs, its different levels, its outside stairs and its inside stairs, its balconies, windows and roofs of different periods and different styles. This is education. These things are the advantages that our lives get from the lives of others.
"Now, for myself, I like the place I live in to resemble my life and that of the people about me. And I am sure that nothing could be better suited to all that than the Squirrel Inn.