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Updated: June 29, 2025
The pictures, the arguments, and especially the illustrious examples, brought down the house, or rather brought it up. Mrs. John is not only fully reconciled to stone walls, but she is decidedly unreconciled to any other, that is, for the first story; the second story is to be of wood, the walls shingled or slated instead of being covered with clapboards, in the orthodox fashion.
As a matter of course, poverty came upon the house and its tenants like an armed man. Loose clapboards rattled in the wind; rags fluttered from the broken windows; within doors were tattered children and scanty fare.
On scores of congested sidings lay huge girders, rolled beams, limbs, and boxes of rivets, once intended for the late Quebec Bridge now so much mere obstruction and the victuals had to pick their way through 'em; and behind the victuals was the lumber clean wood out of the mountains logs, planks, clapboards, and laths, for which we pay such sinful prices in England all seeking the sea.
There was no wood; he tore the clapboards from a near-by cabin and the tar paper from the wind-swept roof. Five minutes later a fire was booming; a girl tired, bent-shouldered, her eyes drooping from a sudden desire for sleep, huddled near it. Houston walked to the pack and took food. "You would rather eat alone?" "Yes." "I shall be in the next cabin awake." "Awake?" "Yes. I'd rather keep watch."
The huts are generally built of split timber, some larger than rails, twelve and a half feet wide and fourteen feet long some with and some without chimneys, and generally without floors; they were generally without daubing, and mostly had split clapboards nailed on the cracks on the outside, though some were without even that: in some there was a kind of rough bedstead, made from rails, polished with the axe, and put together in a very rough manner, the bottom covered with clapboards, and over that a bundle of worn out clothes.
But Englishmen in Virginia had the familiar emigrant idea of making their fortunes. They had left England; they had taken their lives in their hands; they had suffered fevers, Indian attacks, homesickness, deprivation. They had come to Virginia to get rich. Now clapboards and sassafras, pitch, tar, and pine trees for masts, were making no fortune for Virginia shippers.
The he-o-hee of the men as they lifted on the pikes and the sound of the hammer and beetle rang in the air from morning until night. Mrs. Rodney Barnes and Mrs. Dorothy came to help Aunt Deel with the cooking and a great dinner was served on an improvised table in the dooryard, where the stove was set up. The shingles and sheathes and clapboards were on before the day ended.
It was a most heterogeneous mixture that lay before him chips from timber ponds, logs from ship-yards, boards from saw-mills, deals, battens, fence posts, telegraph poles, deal ends, edgings, laths, palings, railway sleepers, treenails, shingles, clapboards, and all the various forms which wood assumes in a country which makes use of it as the chief material of its manufactures.
About the house itself was a clearing of a few acres, with a little orchard on the slope behind the house. The home itself was enclosed by an unpainted picket fence. Lovely old trees shaded it. Vines clambered riotously over its soft, gray clapboards. Well arranged shrubs and bushes had been planted here and there. There were flowers about the base of the house and along the borders.
Beyond the independence of a little sum laid aside for burial-money, and of a few clapboards around and shingles overhead on a lot of American soil owned, and the easy dollars that supply the year's plain clothing and meals, the melancholy prudence of the abandonment of such a great being as a man is to the toss and pallor of years of money-making with all their scorching days and icy nights and all their stifling deceits and underhanded dodgings, or infinitesimals of parlors, or shameless stuffing while others starve ... and all the loss of the bloom and odor of the earth and of the flowers and atmosphere and of the sea, and of the true taste of the women and men you pass or have to do with in youth or middle age, and the issuing sickness and desperate revolt at the close of a life without elevation or naivete, and the ghastly chatter of a death without serenity or majesty, is the great fraud upon modern civilization and forethought, blotching the surface and system which civilization undeniably drafts, and moistening with tears the immense features it spreads and spreads with such velocity before the reached kisses of the soul.... Still the right explanation remains to be made about prudence.
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