With a light answer I would callously shunt investigation. “Oh, Serena tucks them away!” Rectitude, founded on bathtubs, with privacy at one’s mere discretion, had lost its power over me during the years in which I had hoped for a season sufficiently free from disaster to enable me to add two morally indispensable rooms to Len’s cabin; nevertheless the desire hung like a vague compulsion in the back of my mind, unaffected by the indifference of Serena, who, oblivious to restriction, remained the smiling magnet of her swarm. I did go so far as to give Len the lumber from an old house which I had torn down with the luxurious intent of lining my own cabin from the material. I found that it contained enough sound chestnut to provide an ample kitchen for his house, and we spent a happy evening making the plans. There was to be a big fireplace, built by Uncle Ben Copp, an authority on chimney structure, and plenty of “shevs,” about which Len was enthusiastic, though Serena, innocent of industrial vision, liquidly inquired: “Whatever’ll I put on ’em?” Len was to build the kitchen. He was untrained, but not inapt, and rarely finished a job without a proud touch of invention that gave him as much pleasure as the pay he received. But, as the only member of his family possessing the slightest energetic fire, “ever’ turn was hisn,” and he was always two or three years in the rear of his more ambitious intentions. The lumber made a promising stack in the back yard, and occasionally during the season that followed, Len would say to me: “Reckon my work’ll ever let up so’s I can git at that kitchen?” The pile gradually receded, very noticeably after a few days of rainy weather, and by the end of the second year it had withdrawn to invisibility. No one ever spoke of the kitchen again, and I would have been the last to mention it; but when the winter winds found the crevices in my cabin and, with the gaiety of discoverers, attacked my spine, I thought longingly of my lumber that had disappeared in Serena’s cook-stove; and one day I had the pleasure of hearing Si Goforth ask, as he passed through Len’s yard, whatever they’d put their stack o’ chestnut into? Getting no answer from a hurt and silent group, he added slyly: “A lumber pile nigh the house is as bad as a rail fence; it sucks itssef.”