“How be you goin’ to make the top bricks stay up?” sez I, “a layin’ up on nothin’?”
“That is a man’s work,” sez he, “a woman couldn’t understand it if I should explain it.”
“No,” sez I, “Heaven knows no woman on earth would ever understand that idee!”
Well, all I could do he would go that very afternoon and engage a mason to do the work, build the chimbly after his views, beginin’ on top instead of the bottom. But though deeply mortified at it, that wuz jest the move that sot me free from my anxieties about the house, for 324 the mason, who wuz a great case for a joke, made so much fun of the idee, and of the hull structure, that my companion threw up the hull job and told me that the house might go to––for anything he cared. I will never tell the place he said the house might go to, it is too wicked to even think on calmly, it begun with an H and that is all that I will ever tell to anybody.
Well, when Whitfield and Tirzah Ann come back from Maine and went to Shadow Island to see that strange queer lookin’ buildin, I spoze Whitfield laughed till his sides ached. Tirzah cried, they say; cried partly out of sentiment to think her Pa had showed such affection for her as to build the cottage, and partly because it looked so awful, it made her hystericky.
But Whitfield sobered down, and when he come back to Jonesville acted good to Josiah, he seemed to be real thankful to Josiah and me for buildin’ it, and his grateful, affectionate ways kinder took the edge offen Josiah’s humiliation, but then he would probable have sprunted up anyway—mortification never prayed on him for more’n a short time.
Well, the end on’t wuz, Whitfield hired a good carpenter to oversee the work, and some strong 325 workmen who wuz able to lift and lug, there wuz plenty of lumber, and in four weeks the house wuz transmogrified into a good lookin’ cottage. They built on a L, I believe they called it, which they’re to use as a store room, and under that Tirzah Ann is to have her suller, Whitfield wuzn’t the man to deprive her of that comfort. And in some way they straightened up the house, and put in a winder here and there, tore off lots of the ornaments, but left on some of the piazzas, and balconies, and things, and it wuz a pretty and commogious lookin’ cottage. They painted the hull concern a soft buff color, with red ruffs that looked real picturesque settin’ back aginst the dark green of the trees.
And sure enough the first week in September we had our party there. It wuzn’t a surprise—no, Heaven knows the surprise wuz when we first laid eyes on the house as Josiah left it—but it wuz a very agreable party. Tirzah Ann did well by us in cookin’ (of course we helped her) and we all stayed three days and two nights; Thomas J. and Maggie and the children, and Josiah and me. Tirzah Ann and Whitfield stayed longer, so’s to leave everything in first rate order for another year. They sot out some pretty shrubs and made some posy beds under 326 the winders, and planted bulbs in ’em, that they spozed would rise up and break out in sunny smiles when they met ’em another summer. They lay out to take sights of comfort in that house—yes indeed!
And I shouldn’t be at all surprised if it ended by our all havin’ cottages there for summer comfort. It looks like it now. Though I told ’em I’d ruther have our cottage on the main land pretty nigh to ’em; there’s places where the land juts out into the river havin’ all the looks of a island on the fore side, and on the hindside more solidity somehow.
And with the society of the Saint on the front side, and Safety on the hind side, it seems as if anybody could take considerable comfort there.