Treating of a Novel Style of Dwelling-house

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We went down to Ginx's in the first boat, having arranged that our furniture should be sent to us in the afternoon. We wanted to be there to receive it. The trip was just wildly delirious. The air was charming. The sun was bright, and I had a whole holiday. When we reached Ginx's we found that the best way to get our trunks and ourselves to our house was to take a carriage, and so we took one. I told the driver to drive along the river road and I would tell him where to stop.

When we reached our boat, and had alighted, I said to the driver:

"You can just put our trunks inside, anywhere."

The man looked at the trunks and then looked at the boat. Afterward he looked at me.

"That boat ain't goin' anywhere," said he.

"I should think not," said Euphemia. "We shouldn't want to live in it, if it were."

"You are going to live in it?" said the man.

"Yes," said Euphemia.

"Oh!" said the man, and he took our trunks on board, without another word.

It was not very easy for him to get the trunks into our new home. In fact it was not easy for us to get there ourselves. There was a gang-plank, with a rail on one side of it, which inclined from the shore to the deck of the boat at an angle of forty-five degrees, and when the man had staggered up this plank with the trunks (Euphemia said I ought to have helped him, but I really thought that it would be better for one person to fall off the plank than for two to go over together), and we had paid him, and he had driven away in a speechless condition, we scrambled up and stood upon the threshold, or, rather, the after-deck of our home.

It was a proud moment. Euphemia glanced around, her eyes full of happy tears, and then she took my arm and we went down stairs--at least we tried to go down in that fashion, but soon found it necessary to go one at a time. We wandered over the whole extent of our mansion and found that our carpenter had done his work better than the woman whom we had engaged to scrub and clean the house. Something akin to despair must have seized upon her, for Euphemia declared that the floors looked dirtier than on the occasion of her first visit, when we rented the boat.

But that didn't discourage us. We felt sure that we should get it clean in time.

Early in the afternoon our furniture arrived, together with the other things we had bought, and the men who brought them over from the steamboat landing had the brightest, merriest faces I ever noticed among that class of people. Euphemia said it was an excellent omen to have such cheerful fellows come to us on the very first day of our housekeeping.