Besides—so I was wont to argue—what in thunder was the good of having a comfortable cozy bedroom with steam heat and everything in it, and a night lamp for reading if one felt like reading, and a short cut down to the pantry if one felt hungry in the small hours, and then on a cold night deliberately to crawl out on a wind-swept porch hung against the outer wall of the house and sleep there? I once knew one of these sleeping-porch fiends who was given to boasting that in wintertime he often woke to find the snow had drifted in on the top of him while he slept. He professed to like the sensation; he bragged about it. From his remarks you gleaned that his idea of a really attractive boudoir was the polar bear's section up at the Bronx Zoo. I was sorry his name had not been Moe instead of Joe—which was what it was—because if it had only been the former I had thought up a clever play on words. I was going to catch him in company and trap him into boasting about loving to sleep in a snowdrift and then I was going to call him Eskimo, which should have been good for a laugh every time it was spontaneously sprung on a fresh audience.
In short, taking one thing with another, I have never favored sleeping porches. But after listening to friends who either had them or who were so sorry they didn't have them that they were determined we should have a full set of them on our house, we concurred in the consensus of opinion and decided to cast aside old prejudices and to have them at all hazards. I believe in the rule of the majority—of course with a few private reservations from time to time, as for instance, when the majority gets carried away by this bone-dry notion.
I recall in particular one friend who was especially emphatic and especially convincing in the details of offering suggestions and advice, and—where he deemed such painful measures necessary—in administering reproof for and correction of our faulty misconceptions of what a house should be. But then he was a Bostonian by birth and a Harvard graduate and had the manner—shall we call it the slightly superior manner?—which so often marks one who may boast these two qualifications. When you meet a well-bred native Bostonian who has been through Harvard it is as though you had met an egg which had enjoyed the unique distinction of having been laid twice and both times successfully. Our friend was distinctly that way. When he had rendered judgment there was no human appeal. It never occurred to us there could be any appeal.
So we incorporated sleeping porches and vistas through and sun parlors and a hundred other things—more or less—into the plan. Obeying the wills of stronger natures than ours, we figuratively knocked out walls and then on subsequent and what appeared to be superior counsel figuratively stuck them back in again. We lifted the roof for air and we lowered it for style. We tiled the floors and then untiled them and put down beautiful mental hardwood all over the place. We rejected paneled wainscotings in favor of rough-cast plaster and then abolished the plaster for something in the nature of a smooth finish for our walls. By direction we tacked on an ell here and an annex there. If we had kept all the additions which at one period or another we were quite sure we must keep in order to make our home complete we should have had a house entirely unsuitable for persons of our position in life to reside in, but could have made considerable sums of money by renting it out for national conventions.
On one point and only one point did we remain adamant. Otherwise we were as clay in the hands of the potter, as flax to the loom of the weaver; but there we were as adamant as an ant. We concurred in the firm and unswervable decision that—no matter what else we might have or might not have in our house—we would not have a den in it. By den I mean one of those cubby-holes opening off a living room or an entrance hall that is fitted up with woolly hangings and an Oriental smoking set where people are supposed to go and sit when they wish to be comfortable—only nobody in his right mind ever does. In my day I have done too much traveling on the Pullman of commerce to crave to have a section of one in my home. Call them dens if you will; I know a sleeping-car compartment when I see it, even though it be thinly disguised by a pair of trading-stamp scimitars crossed over the door and a running yard of mailorder steins up on a shelf. Several earnest advocates of the den theory tried their persuasive powers on us, but each time one or the other of us turned a deaf ear. When her deaf ear was tired from turning I would turn mine a while, and vice versa. There is no den in our home. Except over my dead body there never shall be one.
While on this general subject I may add that if anybody succeeds in sticking a Japanese catalpa on our lawn it will also be necessary to remove my lifeless but still mutely protesting remains before going ahead with the planting. I have accepted the new state income tax in the spirit in which it seems to be meant—namely, to confiscate any odd farthings that may still be knocking round the place after the Federal income tax has been paid, and a very sound notion, too. What is money for if it isn't for legislators to spend? Should the Prohibitionists put through the seizure-and-search law as a national measure I suppose in time I may get accustomed to waking up and finding a zealous gent with a badge and one of those long prehensile noses especially adapted for poking into other people's businesses, such as so many professional uplifters have, prowling through the place on the lookout for a small private bottle labeled “Spirits Aromatic Ammonia, Aged in the Wood.” With the passage of time I may become really enthusiastic over the prospect of having my baggage ransacked for contraband essences every time I cross the state line. My taste in pyjamas has been favorably commented on and there is no reason why my fellow travelers should not enjoy a treat as the inspector dumps the contents of the top tray out on the car floor. The main thing is to get used to whatever it is that we have got to get used to.
But I have a profound conviction that in the matter of a Japanese catalpa on the lawn, just as in the matter of a den opening off the living room and taking up the space which otherwise would make a first-rate umbrella-and-galosh closet, I could never hope to get used. Nor do I yearn for a weeping mulberry tree about the premises. I dislike its prevalent shape and the sobbing sound it makes when especially moved by the distress which chronically afflicts the sensitive thing. Nature endowed our abandoned farm with a plenteous selection of certain deciduous growths common to the temperate zone—elms and maples and black walnuts and hickories and beeches and birches and dogwoods and locusts; also pines and hemlocks and cedars and spruces. What the good Lord designed as suitable arboreal adornment for the eastern seaboard is good enough for me. I have no desire to clutter up the small section of North America to which I hold the title deeds with trees which do not match in with the rest of North America. I should as soon think of putting a pagoda on top of Pike's Peak or connecting the Thousand Islands with a system of pergolas.
Having got that out of my system, let us get off the grounds and back to the house proper. As I was remarking just before being diverted from the main line, a den was about the only voluntary offering which we positively refused to take over. Every other notion of whatsoever nature was duly adopted and duly carried on to the architect He was a wonderful man. All architects, I am convinced, must be wonderful men, but him I would call one of the pick of his breed. How he managed to make practical use of some of the ideas we brought to him and fit them into the plan; how without hurting our feelings or the feelings of our friends he succeeded in curing us of sundry delusions we had acquired; how he succeeded in confining the ground plan to a scale which would not make the New York Public Library seem in comparison a puny and inconsequential edifice; and how taking a number of the suggestions which came to him and rejecting the others he yet preserved the structural balance and the suitable proportions which he had had in his mind all along—these, to my way of thinking, approximate the Eighth Wonder. No, it is the first wonder; the remaining seven finish place, show and also ran.
After a season of debate, compromise and conciliation, when the gray in his hair had perceptibly thickened and the lines in his face had deepened, though still he wore his chronic patient smile which makes strangers like him, the final specifications were blue-printed and the work was started. A lady to whom I have the honor of being very closely related by marriage removed the first shovel load of loam from the contemplated excavation. She is not what you would call a fancy shoveler and the net result of her labor, I should say offhand, was about a heaping dessert-spoonful of topsoil. Had I guessed what that inconsequential pinch of earth would subsequently mean to us in joy I should have put it in a snuffbox and carried it about with me as the first tangible souvenir of a great accomplishment and a reminder to me never again to look slightingly upon small things. Bulk does not necessarily imply ultimate achievement. If Tom Thumb had been two feet taller and eighteen inches broader than he was I doubt whether he would amounted to much as a dwarf.
Well, we reared the foundations and then one fine April morning our country abandoned its policy of watchful waiting for one of swatful hating. While we were at war it did not seem patriotic to try to go ahead. There was another reason—a variety of reasons rather. Very soon labor was not to be had, or materials either. Take the detail of concrete. Now that the last war is over and the next war not as yet started, I violate no confidence and betray no trust in stating that one of our chief military secrets had to do with this seemingly harmless product. We were shooting concrete at the Germans. In large quantities it was fatal; in small, mussy. And while the Germans were digging the gummy stuff out of their eyes and their hair our fellows would swarm over the top and capture them. And if you are not sure that I am telling the exact truth regarding this I only wish you had tried during active hostilities—as I did—to buy a few jorums and noggins of concrete. Trying would have made a true believer of you, too. And the same might be said for steel girders and cow hair to put into plaster so it will stick, and ten-penny nails. We were firing all these things at the enemy. It must have disconcerted him terribly to be expecting high explosives and have a keg of ten-penny nails or a bale of cow hair burst in his midst. Without desire to detract from the glory of the other branches of the service, I am of the opinion that it was ten-penny nails that won the war. And in bringing about this splendid result I did my share by not buying any in large amount for going on eighteen months.