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Well back from the smooth and shining asphalt, as polished as ebony with its oil-drip and tire-wear, is a row of houses, some shingled and awninged, some Colonial-Spanish, and stuccoed and bone-white in the sun, some dark-wooded and vine-draped and rose-grown, but all immaculate and finished and opulent.
Through the air, on wings of skin or feathers or tissue membrane; crawling or leaping by night; burrowing underground; gnawing up through the great supporting posts; swarming up the bamboos and along the pliant curving stems to drop quietly on the shingled roof; thus had the jungle-life come past Hope's unseeing eyes and found the bungalow worthy residence.
"He said he thought we'd better have the old one shingled." "Turrible short-sighted, that's what I say," grumbled the old man; "but he ain't ever fer branchin' out, the jedge ain't. Why didn't ye talk him over to it, Thinkright?" "I didn't feel strongly about it. He'd do it if I urged him; but it's just as you say, he doesn't want to branch out.
With characteristic disregard of practical difficulties, he answered that it must be possible, for postponement was out of the question. He reached the island on Saturday, the 5th, in the afternoon. The aspect was certainly discouraging. The dormitory was up, but only the frame was completed; there were no floors, nor was the roof shingled. The next day was Sunday.
It no longer called itself a Hotel, but an Inn, and it had a brand-new old-fashioned swinging sign before its door; its front had been cut up into several gables, and shingled to the ground with shingles artificially antiquated, so that it looked much grayer than it naturally ought.
In the course of the conversation I remarked that I had seen some men fixing Potts' roof recently; and when I asked Potts if anything was the matter, he said, "My roof was shingled originally; but as it leaked, I had the shingles removed and a gravel-and-felt roof put on.
"Some of them would be nice enough if they weren't trying to go each other one better all the time; when one gets a thing the others have all got to have it, or have something nicer. Take the Browns, now, your neighbors there " "In the shingled house, with the babies swinging on the gate as we came by?" "Yes, that's it. They've got four little boys.
"In the State of Massachusetts there's a sort of spit running into the sea, and on a sand hill of this there's a little shingled house that never had a drop of paint outside of it nor of plumbing inside; but there's an old well at the back, deep as they dig them, with, on the hottest day, ice-water at the bottom.
In the moment in which the two men faced each other the crowd became so still that, save for the beating of the rain upon the shingled roof and the stamping of a horse in one of the stalls, the place was as silent as a church. "Time!" shouted the master of ceremonies.
When the tinker returned she was sitting on the church steps, the children huddled so close about her that she was barely distinguishable in the encircling mass of shingled heads, bobby curls, pigtails and hair-ribbons.
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