I bought the land and house for twenty-eight hundred dollars--the house being practically thrown in. Because it was lop-sided and old and in need of repair it had no market value whatever. A flimsily built modern bungalow would have brought more. And yet when I examined the timbers I found them of oak, handhewn, and sound as a nut. The underpinning was made of great granite slabs and was as good as the day it was put in, though it had worked askew from the frost. Even the floors, though uneven and needing propping, were sound. The roof boards and shingles had of course rotted, but here again the timbers supporting them had with time only become seasoned. When our great grandfathers built houses they didn’t build for decades but for centuries. They didn’t reckon the cost of the lumber. In a cottage they used beams big enough to support a church, matched them true and fastened them with hand-made spikes a foot long. I couldn’t have bought the lumber alone for what I paid for the house. I couldn’t have bought it anyway. You can’t buy such timber as that any more. I started work upon it at once, because we wanted to get in as soon as possible. From the moment I paid the first installment--I bought it on time as a matter of convenience--we felt this to be our home. I couldn’t spare any of my own men just then and felt anyway that as far as possible I ought to use local labor, so after considerable effort I rounded up three men to help me. I came to know these fellows better later on, but at the start they were almost as foreign to me as though they had come from another country. One of them was a man of fifty, another a man of forty and the third was a young chap not more than twenty-two or three. I’ll call the oldest one Hadley--though that wasn’t his name. The last name doesn’t count for much anyway, because at the end of the week I was calling him Jim and he was calling me Bill. In less than two weeks the children who used to come over to watch us were calling me Bill. Seth Sprague and Josh Chase will do as names for the other two and come pretty close to what their names really were. Josh was the young fellow--a tall, bony lad with shoulders already well rounded, and in many other ways looking as old as Seth, who might have been his father.