loafing Irish boys who superintended it in force.
It pleased him to hear the portable engine chuckle
out a hundred thin whiffs of steam in carrying the big
iron weight to the top of the framework above the pile,
then seem to hesitate, and cough once or twice in
pressing the weight against the detaching apparatus.
There was a moment in which the weight had the effect
of poising before it fell; then it dropped with a mighty
whack on the iron-bound head of the pile, and drove it
a foot into the earth.

"By gracious!" he would say, "there ain't anything
like that in THIS world for BUSINESS, Persis!"

Mrs. Lapham suffered him to enjoy the sight twenty
or thirty times before she said, "Well, now drive on, Si."

By the time the foundation was in and the brick walls had begun
to go up, there were so few people left in the neighbourhood
that she might indulge with impunity her husband's passion
for having her clamber over the floor-timbers and the
skeleton stair-cases with him. Many of the householders
had boarded up their front doors before the buds had
begun to swell and the assessor to appear in early May;
others had followed soon; and Mrs. Lapham was as safe from
remark as if she had been in the depth of the country.
Ordinarily she and her girls left town early in July,
going to one of the hotels at Nantasket, where it was
convenient for the Colonel to get to and from his business
by the boat. But this summer they were all lingering a few