y, by one corner, to one corner. It was as if the lawyer
had had doubts as to how the two houses might like each other, and
had arranged things so that the bond might be broken with as small
a fracture as possible. This "new" part may well have been a
hundred years old at the time, for, whereas the original house was
boarded with oak on oak, this was boarded with splendid clear pine
on oak, marking the transition from the pioneer days when all the
timber for a house was obtained from the neighboring wood, through
the time when the splendid pumpkin pines of the Maine forests were
the commonest and cheapest sources of lumber, to our own, when
even poor spruce and shaky hemlock are scarce and costly. In the
same way you note in these three stages of building three types of
nails. First is the crude nail hammered out by the local
blacksmith, varying in size and shape, but always with a head
formed by splitting the nail at the top and tending the parts to
the right and left. These parts are sometimes quite long, and
clinch back into the board like the top of a capital T. Then came
a better nail of wrought iron, clumsy but effective; and, later
still, the cut nail in sole use a generation ago. That modern
abomination, the wire nail, appears only in repairs.

Thus the old house rose from four rooms to eight, with several
attics, and the singer and lawyers pass off the scene, to be
followed by the Baptist deacon who later seceded and became a
Millerite, holding meetings of great fervor in the front room,
where one wall used to be covered with figures which proved beyond
a doubt that the end of the world was at hand, and where later he
and his fellow believers appeared in their ascension robes. He too
added a wing to the old house, three rooms and another attic, and
when I had laid bare the timbers of this the historian rose,
holding both hands and his cane towards heaven, and orated
fluently.

"There!" he said, "that's Wheeler! I knew it was, for the old
deeds couldn't be read in any other way. They told me it was built
on by the Millerite, but I knew better. This was moved up from the
Wheeler farm, and it was a hundred years old and more when it came
up, sixty years ago. I knew it. Look at those old cap-posts!" I
dodged the cane as it waved, and took another look, for it was
worth while. There were the corner posts, only seven feet high,
but ten inches square at the bottom, solid oak, swelling to fourteen
inches at the top