When I came back with that linen in my hand it was as if I were accompanied by troops of sheeted dead, from whom that italic-footed nightmare could not be persuaded to escape by any sawing of her mouth, or any thumping of her sides with my bare heels. I am astonished now that this terror should have been so transient. The little ones were laid with their father and their brothers and sisters in the unfenced graveyard on the top of our hill, where the pigs foraged for acorns above their heads in the fall; and then my sun shone again. So did the sun of the surviving B----s. The mother turned her household goods into ready money, and with this and the wages due her husband bought a changeable silk dress for herself and an oil-cloth cap for her son, and equipped in these splendors the two set off up the road towards the town of X----, gay, light-hearted in their destitution, and consoled after the bereavement of a single week. X Our new house got on slowly. There were various delays and some difficulties, but it was all intensely interesting, and we watched its growth with eyes that hardly left it night or day. Life in the log-cabin had not become pleasanter with the advance of the summer; we were all impatient to be out of it. We looked forward to our occupation of the new house with an eagerness which even in us boys must have had some sense of present discomfort at the bottom of it. We were to have a parlor, a dining-room, and a library; there were to be three chambers for the family and a spare room; after six months in the log-cabin we could hardly have imagined it, if we had not seen these divisions actually made by the studding. In that region there is no soft wood. The frame was of oak, and my father decided to have the house weather-boarded and shingled with black-walnut, which was so much cheaper than pine, and which, left in its natural state, he thought would be agreeable in color. In this neither the carpenter nor any of the neighbors could think with him; the local ideal was brick for a house, and if not that, then white paint and green blinds, and always two front doors; but my father had his way, and our home was fashioned according to his plans. It appeared to me a palace. I spent all the leisure I had from swimming and Indian fighting and reading in watching the carpenter work, and hearing him talk; his talk was not the wisest, but he thought very well of it himself, and I had so far lapsed from civilization that I stood in secret awe of him, because he came from town--from the pitiful little village, namely, where I went to buy those shrouds.