The next day, which was Sunday, I had ample time to survey the premises. There was a double piazza on three sides, which was an improvement; but the hall door was changed, which wasn’t. Then the little conservatory, hitched on to the double bay window, which looked like its father, was doubtful. But all this was nothing to the confusion which reigned at the back of the house; I only marveled that I had not broken my neck. The walk was up, the drain was up, the pump was up, the pipes were up, the cistern floor was up, and the kitchen roof was up, as well, looming into the sky, but the room was far from being finished. Nothing had worked as she hoped it would, Cilly said, and everything went wrong, especially the eaves-troughs, and conductors, and pipes, and it always rained just at the wrong time, and the cellar filled with water, and everything floated like a boat, and the plastering came down on the stove when Jane was getting dinner, and the soot came down from the chimney on Mary’s clean clothes, and just as she got them all washed again and hung out, they came with a lot of lumber and she had to take them down, and things got so bad that she left in disgust, and Jane had fallen into the drain and sprained her ankle, and mother was sick in bed, and the carpets all up, and, worse than all, the Dunnings were coming next week from New York, and it was more than Cilly could bear. Of course, I told her I’d help her bear it, and I put my shoulder to the wheel and wrote to the Dunnings to defer their visit, and began to investigate matters, which I found had become a little loose, to say the least of it. The men were good enough and faithful enough, and the troubles Cilly had encountered were only the troubles incident upon repairing any old house, a job which is quite as trying to one’s patience, and as exasperating as putting up a stove pipe when no one joint fits another, particularly the elbows, and the result is that new pipe is almost always bought to take the place of the old. So with our house; nothing was right, nothing would do again. No matter how good or how long the piece of conductor, or lead pipe, or bit of siding or floor, it would not fit, and it went to swell the pile of rubbish which, in our back yard was almost mountain high, and reminded me of the excavations in Rome, when I first looked out upon the debris that dreary Sunday morning. But Monday showed a better state of things. I saw that the open drain and cistern hurt Cilly the most, and so I had them closed up first and then plunged into the midst of the repairing, myself, and was astonished to find how rapidly I began to develop a talent for the business. I believe, after all, there is something exhilarating in the smell of fresh plaster, and something exciting in walking over piles of old lath, and bits of broken siding, and base boards, and moldings, and matched stuff, and so on through the whole list of terms in a carpenter’s vocabulary.