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Updated: June 5, 2025
Am I wholly irrational and selfish and bad, or what am I? I know you'll love me, whatever it is, and I wish now I could snuggle on that soft, cushiony shoulder of yours and go to sleep. Can anything be more pitiful than "a fine old family" afflicted with dry-rot like ours? I'm always amused when I read about the suffering in the tenements. The real anguish is up in the homes like ours.
Nearly every day it rains for an hour in torrents. The hot, steaming earth absorbs the water, and the fierce equatorial sun evaporates it, only to return it in a like shower the next day. So every precaution must be taken against dampness and dry-rot. In every well-ordered bungalow seven to nine servants are an absolute necessity, while three others are usually added from time to time.
You do not believe in priests, but a great many of you believe that it is ministers that are 'sent, and that you have no charge. Officialism is the dry-rot of all the Churches, and is found as rampant amongst democratic Nonconformists as amongst the more hierarchical communities.
As it resists the white-ant, an insect that destroys oak and every other kind of wood, and is never subject to the dry-rot, it is invaluable for building purposes. Boats constructed of it, which have been in the water during the whole of this period, and entirely unprotected by paint, are still as sound as they were when first launched.
Within the last four or five years there has been throughout the whole English-speaking world what Mr. Grant Allen happily calls the "recrudescence" of taste in fiction. The effect is less noticeable in America than in England, where effete Philistinism, conscious of the dry-rot of its conventionality, is casting about for cure in anything that is wild and strange and unlike itself.
On the contrary, the manuscript of a classical scholar, despite the present dry-rot of philology, almost invariably gives signs of a habit of orderly and well-governed cerebration. Here, whatever else may be lacking, is discipline.
Two of America's largest publishing houses failed for a tidy sum of five millions or so each, a few years ago, just thru a dogged policy, that extended over a period of fifty years, of promoting cousins, uncles and aunts whose only claim of efficiency was that they had been on the pension roll for a long time. This way lies dry-rot.
"I was wondering to-day when I saw the Highflyer's foremast between the buildings on Fleet Street as I went to meeting, if they were going to let her lie there and dry-rot. I don't think she's being taken proper care of. I must say I hate to see a good vessel go to ruin when there's no need of it."
Thus did Hepzibah bewilder herself with these fantasies of the old time. She had dwelt too much alone, too long in the Pyncheon House, until her very brain was impregnated with the dry-rot of its timbers. She needed a walk along the noonday street to keep her sane.
They were the pride of our hearts. As often happens in the South, there were bedrooms on the lower floor; two of them, in fact, on one side of the hall. The front one had been not only locked but padlocked; the windows had been nailed on the inside, and heavy wooden shutters nailed on the outside. So long had the room been closed that dry-rot had set in.
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