to keep your house as it is. It expresses something
characteristic." I saved myself by forbearing to say it was handsome. It
was, in fact, a vast, gray-green wooden edifice, with a mansard-roof cut
up into many angles, tipped at the gables with rockets and finials, and
with a square tower in front, ending in a sort of lookout at the top,
with a fence of iron filigree round it. The taste of 1875 could not go
further; it must have cost a heap of money in the depreciated paper of
the day.

I suggested something of the kind to my neighbor, and he laughed. "I
guess it cost all we had at the time. We had been saving along up, and
in those days it used to be thought that the best investment you could
make was to put your money in a house of your own. That's what we did,
anyway. I had just got to be superintendent of the Works, and I don't
say but what we felt my position a little. Well, we felt it more than we
did when I got to be owner." He laughed in good-humored self-satire. "My
wife used to say we wanted a large house so as to have it big enough to
hold me, when I was feeling my best, and we built the largest we could
for all the money we had. She had a plan of her own, which she took
partly from the house of a girl friend of hers where she had been
visiting, and we got a builder to carry out her idea. We did have
some talk about an architect, but the builder said he didn't want any
architect bothering around HIM, and I don't know as SHE did, either.
Her idea was plenty of chambers and plenty of room in them, and two big
parlors one side of the front door, and a library and dining-room on
the other; kitchen in the L part, and girl's room over that; wide
front hall, and black-walnut finish all through the first floor. It was
considered the best house at the time in Eastridge, and I guess it was.
But now, I don't say but what it's old-fashioned. I have to own up to
that with the girls, but I tell them so are we, and that seems to make
it all right for a while. I guess we sha'n't change."

He continued to stare at the simple-hearted edifice, so simple-hearted
in its out-dated pretentiousness, and then he turned and leaned over the
top of the fence where he had left his arms lying, while contemplating
the early monument of his success. In making my journalistic study, more
or less involuntary, of Eastridge, I had put him down as materially the
first man of the place; I might have gone farther and put him down as
the first man