We had hewed and mortised and bored the timbers for our new home.

The neighbors came with pikes and helped to raise and stay and cover them.

A great amount of human kindness went into the beams and rafters of that home and of others like it.

I knew that The Thing was still alive in the neighborhood, but even that could not paralyze the helpful hands of those people.

Indeed, what was said of my Uncle Peabody was nothing more or less than a kind of conversational firewood.