CHAPTER VI
TORCHY IN THE GAZINKUS CLASS
I expect I'll get used to it all in time. This rural stuff, I mean. But it ain't goin' to come easy. When you've been brought up to think of home as some place where you've got a right to leave your trunk as long as you pay the rent prompt,—a joint where you have so many square feet of space on a certain floor, and maybe eight or ten inches of brick and plaster between you and a lot of strangers,—and then all of a sudden you switch to a whole house that's all yours, with gobs of land all around it, and trees and bushes and things that you can do what you like with—well, it's sort of staggerin' at first.
Why, the day Vee and I moved into this Harbor Hills place that I'd made the swift trade for with MacGregor Shinn, we just had our baggage dumped in the middle of the livin'-room, chucked our wraps on some chairs, and went scoutin' around from one room to another for over an hour, kind of nutty and excited.
"Oh, look, Torchy!" Vee would exclaim about twice a minute when she discovered something new.
You know, we'd been in the house only once before, and then we'd looked around just casual. And if you want to find out how little you really see when you think you're lookin', you want to make a deal like that once—buy a joint just as it stands, and then, a few days after, camp down in it and tot up what you've really got. Why, say, you'd 'most thought we'd been blindfolded that first time.
Course, this was different. Now we was takin' stock, you might say, of the things we was goin' to live with. And, believe me, I never had any idea I'd ever own such a collection, or so big a slice of the U. S. A.
"Only think, Torchy," says Vee, after we've made the rounds inside. "Ten rooms, just for us!"
"Twelve, countin' the cellar and attic," says I. "But there's more outside, ain't there?"
Yep, there was. There was an old stable that had been turned into a garage, with a couple of rooms finished off upstairs. Then there was a carriage shed, with more rooms over that, also a chicken house beyond. And stowed away in odd corners was all kinds of junk that might be more or less useful to have: a couple of lawn-mowers, an old sleigh hoisted up on the rafters of the carriage house, a weird old buggy, a plow, a grindstone, a collection of old chairs and sofas that had seen better days, a birch-bark canoe—things like that.