Yes, a most absurd little house, with all sorts of blunders in the making of it, but, for all that, a house with a worth of its own. For Jack Maynard had put the frame together with his own unassisted hands, had raised it with but two men to help him, and had finished it off alone. And round about the work, and through and over it, while his hands built visibly, his fancy also built airy habitations, fair and plumb, and changed all the landscape. Before this fairy wand, the forest sank, broad roads unwound, there was a sprinkle of white houses through the green country, like a sprinkle of snow in June; and in place of this rustic nest rose a fair mansion-house, with a comely matron standing in the door, and rosy children playing about.
At this climax of his castle-building Jack Maynard caught breath, and, coming back to the present, found himself halfway up a ladder, with a hammer suspended in his hand, the wild forest swarming with game all about him, and the matron of his vision still Miss Bessie Ware, spinster.
Jack laughed. “So much the better!” he exclaimed, and brought his hammer down with such force, laughing as he struck, that the nail under it bent up double and broke in two, the head half falling to the ground, the point half flattened lengthwise into the board, making a fragment of rustic buhl-work.
“There's a nail driven into the future,” said the builder, and selected another, and struck with better aim this time, so that the little spike went straight through the board, and pierced an oaken timber, and held the two firmly together, and thus did its work in the present.
“Well done!” said Jack; “you have gone through fifty summers in less than a minute.”
The startled woods rang to every blow, the fox and the deer fled at that tocsin of civilization, and the snake slid away, and set the green grass crawling with its hidden windings. Only one living creature, besides the builder, seemed happy and unafraid, and that was a brown-and-white spaniel that dozed in the shadow of the rising walls, stirring only when his master whistled or spoke to him.
“Wake up, Bruno, and tell me how this suits your eyes,” Jack would call out. Whereat Bruno would lift his lids lazily, show a narrow line of his bright brown eyes, give his tail a slow, laborious wag, and subside to his dreams again, and Jack would go on with his work. It seemed to be his heart, rather than the hammer, that drove the nails in; and every timber, board, latch, and hinge caught a momentary life from his hands, and learned his story from some telegraphing pulse. The very stones of the chimney knew that John Maynard and Bessie Ware were to be married as soon as the house should be ready for them.
There was not a dwelling in sight; but half a mile further down the road toward the nearest town, there was an odd, double log-house, wherein lived Dennis Moran and his Norah, three little girls, and Bessie Ware, Dennis Moran's sister's child.
Jack paused in his work, took off his straw hat to wipe away the perspiration from his face and toss his hair back, first hanging on a round of the ladder just above him the hammer that had driven a nail through fifty summers. As he put his hat on again, he glanced downward, and there, at the foot of the ladder, stood twenty summers, looking up at him out of a face as fair as summers ever formed. The apple-blooms had given it their pink and white, the June heavens were not bluer than those eyes, so oddly full of laughter and languor. The deepest nook under a low-growing spruce, nor shadow in vine-draped cave, nor hollow in a thunder-cloud, ever held richer darkness than that hidden in the loose curls and waves of hair that fell about Bessie Ware's shoulders. No part of the charm of her presence was due to her dress, save an air of fresh neatness. A large apron, gathered up by the corners, was full of fragrant arbor-vitæ boughs, gathered to make a broom of. The large parasol, tilted back that she might look upward, allowed a sunbeam to fall on her forehead.
“Oh! what a tall pink has grown up since I came here!” exclaimed the builder, as he saw her.