"Cuz it's pasture land thet's good fer pertaters, an' yer don't need it fer the cows, an' it kin be worked ter give yer a crop right off, even though 'twant ploughed under in the fall," Bert answered. "You trust yer Uncle Hiram fer a bit, sonny." I blushed at my own peevishness, and thanked him humbly. At the house we found awaiting a strange-looking man, small, wrinkled, unkempt, with a discouraged moustache and a nose of a decidedly brighter hue than the rest of his countenance. He was tapping at the sills of the house. "How about it, Hard? Cement?" said Bert. Hard Cider nodded to me, with a keen glance from his little, bloodshot eyes. "Yep," he said. "Stucco over it. Brick underpinnin's be ez good ez noo. Go inside." We stepped upon the side porch, Bert handing me the key and I opening the door of my new dwelling with a secret thrill. Hard Cider at once began on the kitchen floor, ripping up a plank to examine the timbers beneath. There was no cellar under the kitchen, but the timbers were, like those of the barn, huge beams of hand-hewn oak, and were sound. "Plane them planks down and lay a maple floor over 'em," said Hard, with an air of finality. "Very well," said I meekly. "But my woodwork has got to be cypress in the living-room. I insist on cypress." "New step," he added, as we came to the door up into the main house. "Hold on!" said I. "This door leads into the front hall. I don't want that. I want this door closed up and put into the north room, which I'm going to use for a dining-room." "Ain't goin' ter eat in the kitchen, eh? Very well," said Hard. He examined the old door frame carefully, and jotted something in a dirty notebook, which he drew from his pocket, first wetting his flat carpenter's pencil on his tongue. We found that the north room had apparently been used only as a kind of storage closet, doubtless because there was no heater in the house. It had never been papered, and the walls, with a little touching up, were ready for kalsomining. Hard examined the plaster with the loving eye of a connoisseur. "Built ter last in them days," I heard him mutter. The room extended half the depth of the house, which, to be sure, was not great. Beyond it was a second room, on the northeast corner, of the same size. We now crossed the hall to the south side, where there were two corresponding rooms. Here, as on the other side, the chimney and fireplaces were on the inside walls, and the mantels were of a simple but very good colonial pattern, though they had been browned by smoke and time to dirt colour. "Now I want these two rooms made into one," said I. "I want one of the doors into the hall closed up, and a glass door cut out of the south side to a pergola veranda. Can you do it?" Hard examined the partition. He climbed on a box which we dragged in, and ripped away plaster and woodwork ruthlessly, both at the top and at places on the sides, all without speaking a word.