"
That was always a sure sign that he was getting interested in some
scheme.
Then things began to move in earnest. Two carpenters appeared and laid
the sills for an addition to the house, twenty feet long by eighteen
feet wide, just behind the kitchen, which was in the L. The room that
they built had a door opening directly into the kitchen. The floor, I
remember, was of maple and the walls of matched spruce.
Meanwhile the old Squire had had a sewer dug about three hundred feet
long; and to hold the water supply he built a tank of about a thousand
gallons' capacity, made of pine planks; the tank was in the attic
directly over the kitchen stove, so that in winter heat would rise under
it through a little scuttle in the floor and prevent the water from
freezing.
From the tank the pipes that led to the new bathroom ran down close to
the chimney and the stove pipe. Those bathroom pipes gave the old Squire
much anxiety; there was not a plumber in town; the old gentleman had to
do the work himself, with the help of a hardware dealer from the
village, six miles away.
But if the pipe gave him anxiety, the bathtub gave him more. When he
inquired at Portland about their cost, he was somewhat staggered to
learn that the price of a regular tub was fifty-eight dollars.
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