The House | Page 2

virtues
of an axiom.
I recall that one of the first wishes I heard Alice express during our
honeymoon was that we should sometime be rich enough to be able to
build a dear little house for ourselves. We were poor, of course;
otherwise our air castle would not have been "a dear little house"; it
would have been a palatial residence with a dance-hall at the top and a
wine-cellar at the bottom thereof. I have always observed that when the
money comes in the poetry flies out. Bread and cheese and kisses are
all well enough for poverty-stricken romance, but as soon as a poor
man receives a windfall his thoughts turn inevitably to a contemplation
of the probability of terrapin and canvasbacks.

I encouraged Alice in her fond day-dreaming, and we decided between
us that the dear little house should be a cottage, about which the roses
and the honeysuckles should clamber in summer, and which in winter
should be banked up with straw and leaves, for Alice and I were both of
New England origin. I must confess that we had some reason for
indulging these pleasing speculations, for at that time my Aunt Susan
was living, and she was reputed as rich as mud (whatever that may
mean), and this simile was by her neighbors coupled with another,
which represented Aunt Susan as being as close as a clapboard on a
house. Whatever her reputation was, I happened to be Aunt Susan's
nearest of kin, and although I never so far lost my presence of mind as
to intimate even indirectly that I had any expectations, I wrote regularly
to Aunt Susan once a month, and every fall I sent her a box of game,
which I told her I had shot in the woods near our boarding-house, but
which actually I had bought of a commission merchant in South Water
Street.
With the legacy which we were to receive from Aunt Susan, Alice and
I had it all fixed up that we should build a cottage like one which Alice
had seen one time at Sweet Springs while convalescing at that
fashionable Missouri watering-place from an attack of the jaundice.
This cottage was, as I was informed, an ingenious combination of
Gothic decadence and Norman renaissance architecture. Being
somewhat of an antiquarian by nature, I was gratified by the promise of
archaism which Alice's picture of our future home presented. We
picked out a corner lot in,--well, no matter where; that delectable dream,
with its Gothic and Norman features, came to an untimely end all too
soon. At its very height Aunt Susan up and died, and a fortnight later
we learned that, after bequeathing the bulk of her property to foreign
missions, she had left me, whom she had condescended to refer to as
her "beloved nephew," nine hundred dollars in cash and her favorite
flower-piece in wax, a hideous thing which for thirty years had
occupied the corner of honor in the front spare chamber.
I do not know what Alice did with the wax-flowers. As for the nine
hundred dollars, I appropriated it to laudable purposes. Some of it went
for a new silk dress for Alice; the rest I spent for books, and I recall my

thrill of delight when I saw ensconced upon my shelves a splendid copy
of Audubon's "Birds" with its life-size pictures of turkeys, buzzards,
and other fowl done in impossible colors.
After that experience "our house" simmered and shrivelled down from
the Norman-Gothic to plain, everyday, fin-de-siècle architecture. We
concluded that we could get along with five rooms (although six would
be better), and we transferred our affections from that corner lot in the
avenue which had engaged our attention during the
decadent-renaissance phase of our enthusiasm to a modest point in
Slocum's Addition, a locality originally known as Slocum's Slough, but
now advertised and heralded by the press and rehabilitated in public
opinion as Paradise Park. This pleasing mania lasted about two years.
Then it was forever abated by the awful discovery that Paradise Park
was the breeding spot of typhoid fever, and, furthermore, that old man
Slocum's title to the property was defective in every essential
particular.
Alice and I did not find it in our power either to overlook or to combat
these trifling objections; with unabated optimism we cast our eyes
elsewhere, and within a month we found another delectable biding
place--this time some distance from the city--in fact, in one of the new
and booming suburbs. Elmdale was then new to fame. I suppose they
called it Elmdale because it had neither an elm nor a dale. It was
fourteen miles from town, but its railroad transportation facilities were
unique. The five-o'clock milk-train took passengers in to business every
morning, and the