upon rather delicate ground. How shall I reveal that, forasmuch
as many years ago the original gable roof of the old house had
become very leaky, a temporary proprietor hired a band of
woodmen, with their huge, cross-cut saws, and went to sawing the
old gable roof clean off. Off it went, with all its birds' nests,
and dormer windows. It was replaced with a modern roof, more fit
for a railway wood-house than an old country gentleman's abode.
This operation--razeeing the structure some fifteen feet--was, in
effect upon the chimney, something like the falling of the great
spring tides. It left uncommon low water all about the
chimney--to abate which appearance, the same person now proceeds
to slice fifteen feet off the chimney itself, actually beheading
my royal old chinmey--a regicidal act, which, were it not for the
palliating fact that he was a poulterer by trade, and, therefore,
hardened to such neck-wringings, should send that former
proprietor down to posterity in the same cart with Cromwell.

Owing to its pyramidal shape, the reduction of the chimney
inordinately widened its razeed summit. Inordinately, I say, but
only in the estimation of such as have no eye to the picturesque.
What care I, if, unaware that my chimney, as a free citizen of
this free land, stands upon an independent basis of its own,
people passing it, wonder how such a brick-kiln, as they call it,
is supported upon mere joists and rafters? What care I? I will
give a traveler a cup of switchel, if he want it; but am I bound
to supply him with a sweet taste? Men of cultivated minds see, in
my old house and chimney, a goodly old elephant-and-castle.

All feeling hearts will sympathize with me in what I am now about
to add. The surgical operation, above referred to, necessarily