Outside the barn, as I stood under the eaves, there was still a faint streak of light in the western sky, and the new house we were to give the priming coat, built close down to the road, could still be seen. Little strings of water fell from the roof above and made a tiny stream at my feet. The new house had two full stories and an attic. How magnificent to be a man, to be rich and to be able to build such a house! When the fat boy grew into manhood he would inherit the house and many broad acres. He also would be rich and would have a great house, with bathrooms and perhaps electric lights. The automobile had come. No doubt he would have one. How magnificent a house, a farm, an automobile--a beautiful wife to lie with him at night! I had been to Sunday school and had heard the stories of the magnificent men of old, Jacob and David and that young man Absalom, who had everything in the world to look forward to but who nevertheless did unspeakable things. And now the voices of the men inside the barn seemed far away. The new house was in some queer way a menace to me. I wondered why. The older house, the one the young New Englander had builded when he had first come into the new land, stood far away from the road. One went, from the barns, along a path to the right. The path lay beside an apple orchard, and at the orchard’s end there was a bridge over a small stream. Then one crossed the bridge and started climbing the hill against the side of which the house had been built. It had been built of logs, very solidly, on a small terrace, and as the farmer had begun to prosper wings had been added. Back of the house stood forest trees, some the same trees that had been there when the first room of the cabin was built. The young farmer, with some of his neighbors, had felled the trees for his house on the very ground on which it now stood, and then during the long winter he had felled many other trees in the flat plain below, where his farming land was to lie, and, on a certain day, there had no doubt been a log-rolling, with other young farmers and their women coming from far and near. A whole forest of magnificent trees had been rolled into a great pile and burned--there had been feastings, tests of physical strength among the young men, a few unmarried fellows about, looking shyly at the unmarried girls, game on the table, talk in the evening of the possibilities of a war with the slaveholding farmers of the South.