Simeon, you see--He is Angeline Phinney's second cousin and lives in the third house beyond the Holiness Bethel on the right-hand side of the road--Simeon has “done carpentering” here in Bayport all his life. He built practically every henhouse now gracing or disgracing the backyards of our village. He is our “henhouse specialist,” so to speak. He has even been known to boast of his skill. “Henhouses!” snorted Sim; “land of love! I can build a henhouse with my eyes shut. Nowadays when another one of them foolheads that's been readin' 'How to Make a Million Poultry Raisin'' in the Farm Gazette comes to me and says 'Henhouse,' I say, 'Yes sir. Fifteen dollars if you pay me cash now and a hundred and fifteen if you want to wait and pay me out of your egg profits. That's all there is to it.'” And yet, when Captain Darius Nickerson, who made the most of his money selling fifty-foot lots of sand, beachgrass and ticks to summer people for bungalow sites--when Captain Darius, grown purse-proud and vainglorious, expressed a desire for a henhouse with a mansard roof and a cupola, the latter embellishments to match those surmounting his own dwelling, Simeon was set aback with his canvas flapping. At the end of a week he had not driven a nail. “Godfrey's mighty!” he is reported to have exclaimed. “I don't know whether to build the average cupola and trust to a hen's fittin' it, or take an average hen and build a cupola round her. Maybe I'll be all right after I get started, but it's where to start that beats me.” Where to start beat me, also, and it might be beating me yet, if I hadn't dropped in at the post-office and heard Asaph Tidditt telling a story to the group around the stove. After he had finished, and, the mail being sorted, we were walking homeward together, I asked a question. “Asaph,” said I, “when you start to spin a yarn how do you begin?” “Hey?” he exclaimed. “How do I begin? Why, I just heave to and go to work and begin, that's all.” “Yes, I know, but where do you begin?” “At the beginnin', naturally. If you was cal'latin' to sail a boat race you wouldn't commence at t'other end of the course, would you?” “_I_ might; practical people wouldn't, I suppose. But--what IS the beginning? Suppose there were a lot of beginnings and you didn't know which to choose.”