“Be gorry, Jim, ye must make us a spache,” said Mike Conlin.  “Ye’ve plenty iv blarney; now out wid it.”

But Jim was sober.  He was awed by the magnitude of his enterprise.  There was the building in open outline.  There was no going back.  For better or for worse, it held his destiny, and not only his, but that of one other—­perhaps of others still.

“A speech! a speech!” came from a dozen tongues.

“Boys,” said Jim, “there’s no more talk in me now nor there is in one o’ them chips.  I don’t seem to have no vent.  I’m full, but it don’t run.  If I could stick a gimblet in somewhere, as if I was a cider-barrel, I could gi’en ye enough; but I ain’t no barrel, an’ a gimblet ain’t no use.  There’s a man here as can talk.  That’s his trade, an’ if he’ll say what I ought to say, I shall be obleeged to ‘im.  Yates is a lawyer, an’ it’s his business to talk for other folks, an’ I hope he’ll talk for me.”

“Yates!  Yates!” arose on all sides.

Yates was at home in any performance of this kind, and, mounting a low stump, said: 

“Boys, Jim wants me to thank you for the great service you’ve rendered him.  You have come a long distance to do a neighborly deed, and that deed has been generously completed.  Here, in these forest shades, you have reared a monument to human civilization.  In these old woods you have built a temple to the American household gods.  The savage beasts of the wilderness will fly from it, and the birds will gather around it.  The winter will be the warmer for the fire that will burn within it, and the spring will come earlier in prospect of a better welcome.  The river that washes its feet will be more musical in its flow, because finer ears will be listening.  The denizens of the great city will come here, year after year, to renew their wasted strength, and they will carry back with them the sweetest memories of these pure solitudes.

“To build a human home, where woman lives and little children open their eyes upon life, and grow up and marry and die—­a home full of love and toil, of pleasure and hope and hospitality, is to do the finest thing that a man can do.  I congratulate you on what you have done for Jim, and what so nobly you have done for yourselves.  Your whole life will be sweeter for this service, and when you think of a lovely woman presiding over this house, and of all the comfort it will be to the gentle folk that will fill it full, you will be glad that you have had a hand in it.”

Yates made his bow and stepped down.  His auditors all stood for a moment, under an impression that they were in church and had heard a sermon.  Their work had been so idealized for them—­it had been endowed with so much meaning—­it seemed so different from an ordinary “raising”—­that they lost, momentarily, the consciousness of their own roughness and the homeliness of their surroundings.

“Be gorry!” exclaimed Mike, who was the first to break the silence, “I’d ‘a’ gi’en a dollar if me owld woman could ‘a’ heard that.  Divil a bit does she know what I’ve done for her.  I didn’t know mesilf what a purty thing it was whin I built me house.  It’s betther nor goin’ to the church, bedad.”