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The cow-house, on one side, was separated from the pigstyes by a big stack of yellow logs, and the farther corner of the inn was flanked by another stack of split wood, fronted by a pile of brushwood; above was a wooden balcony that ran also along the house-front, and was sheltered by the far-projecting eaves of the shingled roof.
Slowly passing through a certain charming colony of summer homes, they were suddenly hailed. Out from a shingled bungalow, and across a velvet lawn streamed three old friends of Mamma's, Mrs. Law'nce Arch'bald, and her daughter, 'Lizabeth Sarah, who was almost Mamma's age, and 'Lizabeth Sarah's husband, Harry Fairfax. These three were rapturously presented to the Venables by Mrs.
A vision of earnest women in Shetland shawls, with spectacles and thin knobs of hair, eating blueberry pie at unwholesome hours in a shingled dining-room on a bare New England hill-top, rose pallidly between Durham and the verdant brightness of the Champs Elysees, and he protested with a slight smile: "Oh, but my married sister is the black sheep of the family the rest of us never sank as low as that."
Along both sides of it ran a rude plank sidewalk, raised a foot or two above the ground, so that foot-passengers might escape the mire of the thaw in spring. Immediately behind the sidewalk squat, weatherbeaten, frame houses, all of much the same pattern, rose abruptly. On some of the houses the fronts, carried up as high as the ridge of the shingled roof, had an unpleasantly square appearance.
To so many of them a house has been but a shelter for the night a sleeping-place: if you remember that, you do not wonder at fumbling fingers or impatience with our houses full of trinkets. Our needless tangle of furnishing bewilders those who still think the flowers that grow of themselves in the Irish thatch more beautiful than anything under the cover of our prosaic shingled roofs.
There in the mountains young girls did not wear them, save of the "circular" variety, designed to hold back "shingled" tresses.
"I would like to see it, Alessandro," she said gently. "Oh, no, no, Majella!" he cried; "you would not. It is terrible; the houses all unroofed, all but my father's and Jose's. They were shingled roofs; they will be just the same; all the rest are only walls. Antonio's mother threw hers down; I don't know how the old woman ever had the strength; they said she was like a fury.
If a traveler, accustomed to the bustling life of cities, could have ridden through Troy on a summer day, he might easily have fancied himself in a deserted village. Around him he would have seen weather-beaten houses, innocent of paint, the shingled roofs in many instances covered with a rich growth of moss.
"To the east," she whispered, "down the little defile to the river, then south along the shore, it is shingled and open, to the canoe. Walk fast as you can, M'sieu." It was riskful going through the strip of woods, but when they entered the little canon that cleft a ridge of cliffs, rising impudently out of a level land, they mended their pace.
In this way the canvas roof was finally shingled and the hut enlarged, and, under the quickening of a smiling California sky and the forcing of a teeming California soil, the chance-sown seed took root and became known as Medliker's Ranch, or "Medliker's," with its bursting garden patch and its three sheds or "lean-to's."
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