assistants, stovepipe-men's assistants, mason's
assistants, and hodmen who assist the assistants of the
masons, the furnace-men, and the pipe-men. For a day or
two these all take possession of the house and reduce it
to chaos. In the language of Scripture, they enter
in and dwell there. Compare, for the details, Matt. xii.
45. Then you revisit it at the end of the fortnight, and
find it in chaos, with the woman whom you employed to
wash the attics the only person on the scene. You ask
her where the paper-hanger is; and she says he can do
nothing because the plaster is not dry. You ask why the
plaster is not dry, and are told it is because the
furnace-man has not come. You send for him, and he says
he did come, but the stove-pipe man was away. You send
for him, and he says he lost a day in coming, but that
the mason had not cut the right hole in the chimney. You
go and find the mason, and he says they are all fools,
and that there is nothing in the house that need take two
days to finish.

Then you curse, not the day in which you were born,
but the day in which bath-rooms were invented. You say,
truly, that your father and mother, from whom you inherit
every moral and physical faculty you prize, never had a
bath-room till they were past sixty, yet they thrived,
and their children. You sneak through back streets,
fearful lest your friends shall ask you when your house
will be finished. You are sunk in wretchedness, unable
even to read your proofs accurately, far less able to
attend the primary meetings of the party with which you