One of the advantages of being a bachelor when you are building or restoring a house is that you can spend most of your time in the garden. I am by nature a trusting soul anyway (which no woman and possibly no wise man ever is where carpenters, builders, and plumbers are concerned), and I trusted Hard Cider implicitly. He told me the plumbers were "doin' all right," and I believed him. That he himself was doing all right my own eyes told me, for he had by now reached the south rooms, removed the dividing partition, revealing the old, hand-hewn oak beam at the top, and was cutting a double door out in the centre on either side of the great oak upright, toward my future sundial lawn. I stood in this new door, looking back at my twin fireplaces, with their plain-panelled old mantels. "Mr. Howard," said I, "those mantels are about as plain as you could make 'em, and yet they are very handsome, somehow, dingy as they are." "It's the lines," said Hard Cider. "Jest the right lines. Lower 'em six inches, and whar'd they be?" "Could you build me a bookcase, against the wall, just like them, from one to the other and bring it out at right angles five feet into the room from the centre, making it the back of a double settle?" I asked. "I'm a carpenter," Hard replied laconically. "Could you draw me what it would look like first?" "I ain't said I wuz an artist," he answered. "Draw it yerself." I took his proffered pencil, and sketched what I wanted on a clean board. "Yer got too much curve on the base and arms o' them settles," he said judicially. "Ain't no curves in your mantels. You want 'em square, with a panel like them over your fireplaces." He took the pencil away from me, and made a quick, neat, accurate sketch of just what I instantly saw I did want. [Illustration:] I shrugged my shoulders. "Go ahead!" said I. "What did you ask me to draw it for in the first place?" "Folks likes to think they hev their own idees," he answered. I turned away, through the new south door, into the May sunshine. The pergola was not commenced. In fact, I had decided not to build it till the following spring. Those beastly painters whom I had forgotten were going to eat up too much of my slender capital. Before me stretched the 250 feet of ploughed slope which was to be my sundial lawn. At the end of it was my line of stakes where the ramblers were to climb. Beyond that was the vegetable garden, newly harrowed and fertilized, where Mike and Joe were busily working, the one planting peas, the other setting out a row of beets. The horse was not in evidence. I could have him at last, to make my lawn! I ran around the house to the stable, clumsily put on his harness, for I was not used to horses, led him to the shed where my tools were stored, hitched him to my new drag scraper, and drove him to the slope.