ent by professing not to notice it; people who still
"hung on to the Hill" put their handkerchiefs to their noses, and told
each other the old terrible stories of the material used in filling up
the Back Bay.

Nothing gave Lapham so much satisfaction in the whole construction of
his house as the pile-driving. When this began, early in the summer, he
took Mrs. Lapham every day in his buggy and drove round to look at it;
stopping the mare in front of the lot, and watching the operation with
even keener interest than the little loafing Irish boys who
superintended it in force. It pleased him to hear the portable engine
chuckle out a hundred thin whiffs of steam in carrying the big iron
weight to the top of the framework above the pile, then seem to
hesitate, and cough once or twice in pressing the weight against the
detaching apparatus. There was a moment in which the weight had the
effect of poising before it fell; then it dropped with a mighty whack
on the iron-bound head of the pile, and drove it a foot into the earth.

"By gracious!" he would say, "there ain't anything like that in THIS
world for BUSINESS, Persis!"

Mrs. Lapham suffered him to enjoy the sight twenty or thirty times
before she said, "Well, now drive on, Si."

By the time the foundation was in and the brick walls had begun to go
up, there were so few people left in the neighbourhood that she might
indulge with impunity her husband's passion for having her clamber over
the floor-timbers and the skeleton stair-cases with him. Many of the
householders had boarded up their front doors before the buds had begun
to swell and the assessor to appear in early May; others had followed
soon; and Mrs. Lapham was as safe from remark as if she had been in the
depth of the country. Ordinarily she and her girls left town early in
July, going to one of the hotels at Nantasket, where it was convenient
for the Colonel to get to and from his business by the boat. But this
summer they were all lingering a few weeks later, under the novel
fascination of the new house, as they called it, as if there were no
other in the world.

Lapham drove there with his wife after he had set Bartley Hubbard down
at the Events office, but on this day something happened that
interfered with the solid pleasure they usually took in going over the
house. As the Colonel turned from casting anchor at the mare's head
with the hitching-weight, after helping his wife to alight, he
encounte