Chapter V
I AM HUMBLED BY A DRAG SCRAPER
One of the advantages of being a bachelor when you are building or restoring a house is that you can spend most of your time in the garden. I am by nature a trusting soul anyway (which no woman and possibly no wise man ever is where carpenters, builders, and plumbers are concerned), and I trusted Hard Cider implicitly. He told me the plumbers were “doin’ all right,” and I believed him. That he himself was doing all right my own eyes told me, for he had by now reached the south rooms, removed the dividing partition, revealing the old, hand-hewn oak beam at the top, and was cutting a double door out in the centre on either side of the great oak upright, toward my future sundial lawn. I stood in this new door, looking back at my twin fireplaces, with their plain-panelled old mantels.
“Mr. Howard,” said I, “those mantels are about as plain as you could make ’em, and yet they are very handsome, somehow, dingy as they are.”
“It’s the lines,” said Hard Cider. “Jest the right lines. Lower ’em six inches, and whar’d they be?”
“Could you build me a bookcase, against the wall, just like them, from one to the other and bring it out at right angles five feet into the room from the centre, making it the back of a double settle?” I asked.
“I’m a carpenter,” Hard replied laconically.
“Could you draw me what it would look like first?”
“I ain’t said I wuz an artist,” he answered. “Draw it yerself.”
I took his proffered pencil, and sketched what I wanted on a clean board.