Ferman Henry was a carpenter, and a good one, everybody said, although it was not easy to get him to undertake a job of work; and if he began to build something, he would never finish it, but leave it for someone else when it was partly done. He was a large, fat man, and when I first knew him he wore a colored shirt, and trousers made of blue drilling with wide suspenders passing over his great shoulders; sometimes one of these was broken, and he often fastened the end to his trousers with a nail that slipped through a hole in the suspender and in the cloth, where a button was torn off. He often wore cowhide boots, with his trousers legs sometimes inside and sometimes outside; but generally he was barefoot when we went past the house. I do not remember seeing him in winter-time, perhaps because then he was not out of doors under the big oak-tree. At any rate, my memory pictures him only as I have described him. When I first heard of Ferman Henry, I was told about his house. This was begun before the war, and he was building it himself. He began it so that he might be busy when he had no other work to do; and then too his family was always getting larger, and he needed a new home. He had worked occasionally upon the house for six or seven years, and then he went out as a soldier with the three-months’ men. This absence hindered him seriously with his work; but before he went away he managed to inclose enough of the house so that he was able to move his family in, intending to finish the building as soon as he got back. The house was not a large affair,—an upright part with three rooms above and three below, and a one-story kitchen in the shape of an L running from the side. But it was really to be a good house, for Ferman Henry was a good carpenter and was building it for a home. After he got back from the war he would take little jobs of work from the neighbors now and then, but still tinkered at his house. When any work of special importance or profit came along, he refused it, saying he must first “finish up” his house. I can just remember the building as it appeared when I commenced going to the district school. The clapboards had begun to brown with age and wind and rain. The front room was done, excepting as to paint. The back room below and the rooms upstairs were still unfinished, and the L was little more than a skeleton waiting for its bones to be covered up. The front doors and windows had been put in, but the side and back windows were boarded up, and no shutters had appeared. Back of the house was a little barn with a hen-house on one side, and on the other was a pen full of grunting pigs, drinking swill, growing fat, climbing into the trough, and running their long snouts up through the pen to see what we children had brought for them to eat.