During the months that followed I learned a lot about the intricacies and the mysteries of house building. Beforehand, in my ignorance I figured that the preliminary plans might be stretched out or contracted in to suit the shifting mood of the designer and the sudden whim of his client, but that once the walls went up and the beams went across and the rafters came down both parties were thereafter bound by set metes and bounds. Not at all. I discovered that there is nothing more plastic than brickwork, nothing more elastic than a girder. A carpenter spends days of his time and dollars of your money fitting and joining a certain section of framework; that is to say, he engages in such craftsmanship when not sharpening his saw. It has been my observation that the average conscientious carpenter allows forty per cent of his eight-hour day to saw sharpening. It must be a joy to him to be able to give so much time daily to putting nice keen teeth in a saw, knowing that somebody else is paying him for it at the rate of ninety cents an hour. Watching him at work in intervals between saw filing, you get from him the impression that unless this particular angle of the wooden skeleton is articulated just so the whole structure will come tumbling down some day when least expected. At length he gets the job done to his satisfaction and goes elsewhere. Along comes a steamfitter and he, whistling merrily the while, takes a chisel or an adze or an ax and just bodaciously haggles a large ragged orifice in the carpenter's masterpiece. Through the hole he runs a Queen Rosamond's maze of iron pipes. He then departs and the carpenter is called back to the scene of the mutilation. After sharpening his saw some more in a restrained and contemplative manner, he patches up the wound as best he can. Enter, then, the boss plumber accompanied by a helper. The boss plumber finds a comfortable two-by-four to sit on and does sit thereon and lights up his pipe and while he smokes and directs operations the assistant or understudy, with edged tools provided for that purpose, tears away some of the cadaver's most important ribs and several joints of its spinal column for the forthcoming insertion of various concealed fixtures. Following the departure of these assassins the patient carpenter returns and to the best of his ability reduces all the compound fractures that he conveniently can get at, following which he sharpens his saw--not the big saw which he sharpened from eight-forty-five to ten-fifteen o'clock this morning, but the little buttonhole saw which he has not sharpened since yesterday afternoon; this done, he calls it a day and goes home to teach his little son Elmer, who expects to follow in the paternal footsteps, the rudiments of the art of filing a saw without being in too much of a hurry about it, which after all is the main point in this department of the carpentering profession.