The Whole Family | Page 3

tea-time."
"Glad it isn't your DINNER-time!" he said, heartily.
"Well, yes. We don't see the sense of dining late in a place like this.
The fact is, we're both village-bred, and we like the mid-day dinner.
We make rather a high tea, though."
"So do we. I always want a dish of something hot. My wife thinks cake
is light, but I think meat is."
"Well, cake is the New England superstition," I observed. "And I
suppose York State, too."
"Yes, more than pie is," he agreed. "For supper, anyway. You may
have pie at any or all of the three meals, but you have GOT to have
cake at tea, if you are anybody at all. In the place where my wife lived,
a woman's social standing was measured by the number of kinds of
cake she had."
We laughed at that, too, and then there came a little interval and I said,
"Your place is looking fine."
He turned his head and gave it a comprehensive stare. "Yes, it is," he
admitted. "They tell me it's an ugly old house, and I guess if my girls,

counting my daughter-in-law, had their way, they would have that
French roof off, and something Georgian--that's what they call it--on,
about as quick as the carpenter could do it. They want a kind of classic
front, with pillars and a pediment; or more the Mount Vernon style,
body yellow, with white trim. They call it Georgian after Washington?"
This was obviously a joke.
"No, I believe it was another George, or four others. But I don't wonder
you want 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 intellectually. We folk who have to do more
constantly with reading and writing are apt to think that the other folk
who have more to do with making and marketing have not so much
mind, but I fancy we make a mistake in that now and then. It is only
another kind