From that point on, the work went along swimmingly. After getting all the buildings straightened up I brought down a couple of carpenters to do the shingling. At different times Seth and Jim and Josh came along to watch proceedings. They bore no ill will and offered me plenty of advice. At first I resented this, but after a while I learned not to mind. I couldn’t help liking the men after a fashion and I enjoyed their stories. They took as paternal an interest in my affairs as though I were a tenant and they were landlords. They were like children in the intimate questions they asked, but I found that they were not at all disturbed if they received no replies. After the shingling I began on the plastering. I knocked down the old plastering in every room and found that the lathing was all of the old split-board kind. This really made a stronger and firmer background than the modern lathing. I made another find; two fireplaces which had been bricked up to accommodate air-tight stoves. I was mighty well pleased with this because I’m fond of fireplaces and had wondered how I was going to build one without tearing the house half to pieces. The next thing we did was to putty up the holes and cracks and paint every speck of wood inside and out a dead white. Ruth insisted on white. “Somehow I wouldn’t feel I was living in the country if my house wasn’t white,” she said. I agreed with her, for to my mind there’s no color so fresh and bright looking. And the very first coat brought the old house to life. It’s wonderful what paint will do. It didn’t make the house look new in the sense of making it appear like a house of to-day, but rather carried it back to its youth. It was like making an old man young again. We could hardly wait for the paint to dry before starting the second coat, and that carried us back another twenty-five years. Even Seth, who at the start had allowed that the old shack wasn’t worth repairing, admitted now that it began to look real nifty. And the inside looked as fine as the outside. When we began, the woodwork was discolored both by age and dirt. This made the whole interior look worse than a cheap tenement. Twenty dollars’ worth of white lead and oil changed this as though by magic into a clean white, as fresh as when the house was first built. There is nothing which shows age more than paint and there’s nothing so easily remedied. If the owners had done what I had already done they would have made almost three hundred per cent. interest on their investment. In three weeks, at a cost of four hundred dollars, I had added fifteen hundred in value to the place. And it was a legitimate value. My paint hadn’t covered up defects; it had simply brought out the honest worth of the structure.