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Updated: May 25, 2025
It was standing considerably away from the shore, but its newness was apparent, for on its roof, busily engaged at shingling, was an agile Indian youth of some seventeen years. "That youngster built that house all by himself," volunteered one of the ship's officers at my elbow. "He is a born carpenter, and gets all the work he can do.
"All done but the shingling and I ain't got 'em bought yet!" grumbled Tom, but was utterly disregarded in the sonorous chords of Belle's prelude to the song.
"The stairs have been shored up," he said, "and when the fists that holds 'em up goes, down they'll come. It ain't safe for no man to go over them stairs. Hurry along your ladder, that's your only chance." All was wild confusion around the burning house. The ladder they had gone for was missing from its case, a neighbor had carried it off for the workmen who were shingling his roof.
Sometimes he stood and with tilted head studied his work a minute, then swiftly proceeded. He placed three tree trunks on each side for pillars, laid joists across, formed his angle, and nailed boards as a foundation for shingling. Occasionally he glanced toward the cabin, and finally came swinging up the drive.
But it was touching to find even here that, though the whole worldly goods of the community would scarcely have fetched ten dollars, the souls of men were still held worth caring for one handsome youth's contempt notwithstanding for presently we came upon a pretty little church, with a schoolhouse near by, while from the roof of an adjacent building we were hailed by a pleasant-faced white man, busy with some shingling.
She felt very restless, because she had to give up "housekeeping" with Prudy, a very fascinating game, which could only be played on the river-bank. She looked out of the kitchen window, and saw some carpenters shingling the barn. "O, hum!" she murmured, "I wish grandpa wouldn't mend his barn!" A white mist was creeping slowly over the river and the distant hills.
A piano-top buggy on a muddy, board-sidewalked street, all cut up by the narrow tires; the shingling at the corner of a veranda on a new-built house; a broken snake-fence girdling an old pasture of mulleins and skull-headed boulders; a wisp of Virginia creeper dying splendidly on the edge of a patch of corn; half a dozen panels of snow-fence above a cutting, or even a shameless patent-medicine advertisement, yellow on the black of a tobacco-barn, can make the heart thump and the eyes fill if the beholder have only touched the life of which they are part.
And then if it ain't well looked after and the post gets rotten at the bottom, on a stormy day it's apt to fall and smash the roof of the house in, which is rather lucky, for most likely it wanted shingling, and it is time it was done.
Many a dispute have I heard raging high between professed "beach-combers," as to whether the hides should be stowed "shingling," or "back-to-back, and flipper-to-flipper;" upon which point there was an entire and bitter division of sentiment among the savans.
One June when he was shingling the old barn he engaged me to pick him some wild strawberries. When I came in the afternoon with my four-quart pail nearly full he came down off the roof and gave me a silver quarter, or two shillings, as then called, and I felt very rich.
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