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THE KEEPER'S HOUSE 1

THOMAS HARDY

It was a satisfaction to walk into the keeper's house, even as a stranger, on a fine spring morning like the present. A curl of wood smoke came from the chimney and drooped over the roof like a blue feather in a lady's hat; and the sun shone obliquely upon the patch of grass in front, which reflected its brightness through the open doorway and up the staircase opposite, lighting up each riser with a shiny green radiance and leaving the top of each step in shade.

The window-sill of the front room was between four and five feet from the floor, dropping inwardly to a broad low bench, over which, as well as over the whole surface of the wall beneath, there always hung a deep shade, which was considered objectionable on every ground save one, namely, that the perpetual sprinkling of seeds and water by the caged canary above was not noticed as an eyesore by visitors. The window was set with thickly leaded diamond glazing, formed, especially in the lower panes, of knotty glass of various shades of green. Nothing was better known to Fancy than the extravagant manner in which these circular knots or eyes distorted everything seen through them from the outside lifting hats from heads, shoulders from bodies; scattering the spokes of cart wheels, and bending the straight fir trunks into semicircles. The ceiling was carried by a beam traversing its midst, from the side of which projected a large nail, used solely and constantly as a peg for Geoffrey's hat; the nail was arched by a rainbowshaped stain, imprinted by the brim of the said hat when it was hung there dripping wet.

The most striking point about the room was the furniture. This was a repetition upon inanimate objects of the old principle introduced by Noah, consisting for the most part of two articles of every sort. The duplicate system of furnishing owed its existence to the forethought of Fancy's mother, exercised

1 From Under the Greenwood Tree.

from the day of Fancy's birthday onwards. The arrangement spoke for itself: nobody who knew the tone of the household could look at the goods without being aware that the second set was a provision for Fancy when she should marry and have a house of her own. The most noticeable instance was a pair of green-faced eight-day clocks ticking alternately, which were severally two-and-a-half minutes and three minutes striking the hour of twelve, one proclaiming, in Italian flourishes, Thomas Wood as the name of its maker, and the other — arched at the top, and altogether of more cynical appearance that of Ezekiel Saunders. They were two departed clockmakers of Casterbridge, whose desperate rivalry throughout their lives was nowhere more emphatically perpetuated than here at Geoffrey's. These chief specimens of the marriage provision were supported on the right by a couple of kitchen dressers, each fitted complete with their cups, dishes, and plates, in their turn followed by two dumb-waiters, two family Bibles, two warmingpans, and two intermixed sets of chairs.

But the position last reached the chimney-corner was, after all, the most attractive side of the parallelogram. It was large enough to admit, in addition to Geoffrey himself, Geoffrey's wife, her chair, and her work-table, entirely within the line of the mantel, without danger or even inconvenience from the heat of the fire; and was spacious enough overhead to allow the insertion of wood poles for the hanging of bacon, which were cloaked with long shreds of soot floating on the draught like the tattered banners on the walls of ancient aisles.

These points were common to most chimney-corners of the neighborhood; but one feature there was which made Geoffrey's fireside not only an object of interest to casual aristocratic visitors to whom every cottage fireside was more or less a curiosity - but the admiration for friends who were accustomed to fireplaces of the ordinary hamlet model. This peculiarity was a little window in the chimney back, almost over the fire, around which the smoke crept caressingly when it left the perpendicular course. The window board was curiously stamped with black circles, burnt thereon by the heated bottoms of drinking-cups

which had rested there after previously standing on the hot ashes of the hearth for the purpose of warming their contents, the result giving to the ledge the look of an envelope which has passed through innumerable post-offices.

EXPOSITION HALL AND. BRIDGE SHOP1

ONE of the principal structures for the International Building Exposition at Leipzig is the 164 X 342 feet steel-frame building designed by Paul Banft, of Leipzig, built by Grohmann & Frosch, and rented to the exposition for use as Machinery Hall. The building was designed with special consideration for its subsequent use by the builders as a bridge shop, and its arrangement and equipment of travelling cranes are intended to serve both purposes.

It is about sixty-seven and one-half feet high to the top of the main roof and has one eighty-five feet centre aisle commanded by two ten-ton travelling cranes, and two thirty-nine feet side. aisles with single five-ton cranes. The general design of the building conforms closely to advanced steel-shop construction in this country, but the details vary considerably from it in some of the important members. The wall columns, twenty-three feet apart, carry the side aisle roof trusses directly, and the centre-aisle columns, sixty-nine feet apart, carry riveted longitudinal trusses about fourteen feet deep, each of which supports two intermediate centre and side-aisle roof trusses, while every third roof truss is carried directly on the columns. The centre-aisle columns are double with two H-shape shafts four and a half feet apart transversely, with their feet riveted between the webs of a single long, wide, structural-steel pedestal.

The inner shaft has a much lighter section and is braced to it with horizontal and diagonal struts forming essentially the web members of a vertical truss. Riveted to the face of this column are the runway trusses four and one-half feet deep, of the ten-ton

1 From The Engineering Record, January 17, 1914.

crane girders. As these girders are thus offset nearly five feet beyond the centre of the main longitudinal girders, they are supported from the latter at intermediate points by cantilever brackets twenty-three feet apart, which produce eccentric loading on the longitudinal trusses. The building is lighted by large continuous window areas in the side walls and in the inclined clere-story surfaces of the centre-aisle roof and monitor.

SECOND-STORY BUNGALOW APARTMENTS 1

A COLONY of one-story bungalows built about a court on the roof of a block of stores is a new idea in the apartment houses which has recently been realized in Long Beach, California. From the street the bungalow apartment building looks like an ordinary brick business block with shops below and flats on the second floor. But the stairway from the street, instead of leading to a second story, takes one to a broad sunny court on the roof of the shops. Down the centre of the court is a pergola with flower boxes beneath it, and around the four sides are the low gables of seventeen one-story Swiss-chalet bungalows. Flower boxes under the windows, and plaster walls trimmed with dark wood, make them look like a row of bungalows on the street. In all there are two two-room, four three-room, and eleven four-room bungalow apartments about the court. Each pair of bungalows has a common sheltered porch, recessed so that the entrance doors open into the living rooms. Their kitchens and dining rooms face the court and their living and sleeping rooms overlook the street. Each has its own bathroom and plenty of closet room. The common laundry is not in the basement, but on the roof of one of the bungalows, and clothes are hung out on the roofs of the kitchens unseen from the street below. The floor of the court is covered with heavy deck roofing, drained by a gutter in the centre, and garbage is taken care of in boxes with ventilating pipes leading through the roof.

1 From Popular Mechanics, October, 1913.

THE DOCTOR'S HOME 1

F. HOPKINSON SMITH

THE Doctor is not one of your new-fashioned doctors quartered in a brownstone house off the Avenue, with a butler opening the door; a pair of bob-tailed grays; a coupé with a note-book tucked away in its pocket bearing the names of various millionaires; an office panelled in oak; a waiting-room lined with patients reading last month's magazines until he should send for them. He has no such abode nor belongings. He lives all alone by himself in an old-fashioned house on Bedford Place - oh, such a queer, hunched-up old house and such a quaint old neighborhood poked away behind Jefferson Market and he opens the door himself and sees everybody who comes great many of them nowadays, more's the pity.

there are not a

There are only a few such houses left up the queer old-fashioned street where he lives. The others were pulled down long ago, or pushed out to the line of the sidewalk and three or four stories piled on top of them. Some of these modern ones have big, carved marble porticos, made of painted zinc and fastened to the new brickwork. Inside these portals are a row of bronze bells and a line of speaking tubes with cards below bearing the names of those who dwell above.

The Doctor's house is not like one of these. It would have been had it not belonged to his old mother, who died long ago and who begged him never to sell it while he lived. He was thirty years younger then, but he is still there and so is the old house. It looks a little ashamed of its shabbiness when you come upon it suddenly hiding behind its pushing neighbors. First comes an iron fence with a gate never shut, and then a flagged path dividing a grass-plot, and then an old-fashioned wooden stoop with two steps, guarded by a wooden railing (many a day since these were painted); and over these railings and up the supports which carry the roof of the portico, straggles a

From "Doc' Shipman's Fee," in The Under Dog. Charles Scribner's Sons. Reprinted by permission.

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