“Not now, thank you.  It’s about our tea-time.”

“Glad it isn’t your dinner-time!” he said, heartily.

“Well, yes.  We don’t see the sense of dining late in a place like this.  The fact is, we’re both village-bred, and we like the mid-day dinner.  We make rather a high tea, though.”

“So do we.  I always want a dish of something hot.  My wife thinks cake is light, but I think meat is.”

“Well, cake is the New England superstition,” I observed.  “And I suppose York State, too.”

“Yes, more than pie is,” he agreed.  “For supper, anyway.  You may have pie at any or all of the three meals, but you have got to have cake at tea, if you are anybody at all.  In the place where my wife lived, a woman’s social standing was measured by the number of kinds of cake she had.”

We laughed at that, too, and then there came a little interval and I said, “Your place is looking fine.”

He turned his head and gave it a comprehensive stare.  “Yes, it is,” he admitted.  “They tell me it’s an ugly old house, and I guess if my girls, counting my daughter-in-law, had their way, they would have that French roof off, and something Georgian—­that’s what they call it—­on, about as quick as the carpenter could do it.  They want a kind of classic front, with pillars and a pediment; or more the Mount Vernon style, body yellow, with white trim.  They call it Georgian after Washington?” This was obviously a joke.

“No, I believe it was another George, or four others.  But I don’t wonder you want to keep your house as it is.  It expresses something characteristic.”  I saved myself by forbearing to say it was handsome.  It was, in fact, a vast, gray-green wooden edifice, with a mansard-roof cut up into many angles, tipped at the gables with rockets and finials, and with a square tower in front, ending in a sort of lookout at the top, with a fence of iron filigree round it.  The taste of 1875 could not go further; it must have cost a heap of money in the depreciated paper of the day.

I suggested something of the kind to my neighbor, and he laughed.  “I guess it cost all we had at the time.  We had been saving along up, and in those days it used to be thought that the best investment you could make was to put your money in a house of your own.  That’s what we did, anyway.  I had just got to be superintendent of the Works, and I don’t say but what we felt my position a little.  Well, we felt it more than we did when I got to be owner.”  He laughed in good-humored self-satire.  “My wife used to say we wanted a large house so as to have it big enough to hold me, when I was feeling my best, and we built the largest we could for all the money we had.  She had a plan of her own, which she took partly from the house of a girl friend of hers where she had been visiting, and we got a builder to carry out her idea.  We did have some talk about an architect, but the builder said he didn’t want