I came to know them all, from _mitering_ to _nosing_, though I never rightly made out the orthography of that last word or its derivation either, but I knew just what it was, and was great on a squint to see if things were square or _plumb_, as Billy called it, and I think I made them change one window three times, and a certain door twice. What a propensity they did have for getting things wrong, that is, according to my ideas, and poor Cilly had been driven nearly crazy with windows just where she did not want them, and doors opening against her furniture. Then, too, she informed me, she began to suspect that the men thought she was strong-minded, and wanted to vote, because she superintended them, and was always in the thickest of it, and exactly in their way. Whether they liked masculine rule better, I never heard. I only know that they all worked well and faithfully, and they certainly did get on faster when they were not obliged to pull down one day what they had done the day before. This had been Cilly’s method of procedure, aided and abetted by her mother, whom the men stigmatized as “the old one,” and who spied upon them from every keyhole, and came unexpectedly upon them from every corner. She was disabled now, and could only issue daily bulletins to which I paid no heed, and so the repairs went on, and just three months after the first nail was driven the last man departed, and we went to work setting to rights, which would have been delightful business, if only we could have found our things, but everything was lost or mislaid. Curtain fixtures were gone; door keys were gone; stair rods were missing; screw drivers and tack-hammers could not be found; wood-saw broken; both trowels lost; water pails full of plaster, and all the brooms in the house spoiled, to say nothing of the dusters and dust pans broken, and dippers lost. But then, we had a double piazza, and a place for flowers, and a china closet so big that I had to spend a hundred dollars to fill it, and our bed-room has two arches over the south windows, and a raised platform behind them, and we have each of us a bureau in a dressing-room which looks like a long hall, and I have four drawers all to myself for my shirts and neckties, and a quarter of a closet, and there are east windows and south windows, which make it so bright in the morning that the flies bite me awfully, and we had to buy a mosquito net to keep them off, and instead of being disturbed by Mrs. Patterson’s pump, and looking into nothing but her back yard and kitchen, we now look into Mrs. Alling’s barn-yard, with a most unsightly corn-crib in the center of it, and Mrs. Alling’s roosters have a bad habit of crowing every hour, while at about three or four o’clock in the morning, the noise is so terrible, that I believe her hens crow too.