, with double tenants on which sat the great
square oak-plates, dovetailed and pinned together, and pinned
again to the cap. A hundred and fifty years old and more was this
addition, which the Millerite had moved up from the Wheeler farm
and built on for his boot-shop; yet these great oak cap-posts
marked a period far more remote. They were second-hand when they
went into the Wheeler building, for there were in them the marks
of mortising that had no reference to the present structure. Some
building, old a century and a half ago, had been torn down and its
timbers used for the part that "had been Wheeler."

Thus the old house grew again as it fell, and the old-time owners
and inhabitants stepped forth into life once more. Yet I found
traces of other tenants that paid neither rent nor taxes, yet
occupied apartments that to them were commodious and comfortable.
In the attic were the bats, but not they alone. Snuggled up
against the chimney in the southern angle, right under the ridge-pole,
was a whole colony of squash bugs which had wintered safely
there and were only waiting for the farmer's squash vines to
become properly succulent. A bluebottle fly slipped out of a
crevice and buzzed in the sun by the attic window. Under every
ridge-board and corner-board, almost under every shingle, were the
cocoons and chrysalids of insects, thousands of silent lives
waiting but the touch of the summer sun to make them vocal.

On the ground floor, within walls, were the apartments of the
rats, their empty larders choked with corn-cobs showing where once
had been feasting, their bed chambers curiously upholstered with
rags laboriously dragged in to senseless confusion. The field mice
had the floor above. Here and there on the plates, between joists,
and over every window and door, were their nests, carefully made
of wool, chewed from old garments and made fine, soft, and cosy.
Their larders were full of cherry-stones, literally bushels on
bushels of them, each with a little round hole gnawed in it and
the kernel extracted. As the toil of the human inhabitants year
after year had left its mark on the floors of the house, worn thin
everywhere, in places worn through with the passing and repassing
of busy feet, so had the generations of field mice left behind
them mute witnesses of patient, enormous labor. From the two
cherry trees in the neighboring yard how many miles had these shy
little people traveled, unseen of men, with one che