- end_line
- 9342
- extracted_at
- 2026-01-30T20:48:26.985Z
- extracted_by
- structure-extraction-lambda
- start_line
- 9284
- text
- likes young company; and offers to ride young colts; and sets out young
suckers in the orchard; and has a spite against my elbowed old
grape-vine, and my club-footed old neighbour, and my claw-footed old
chair, and above all, high above all, would fain persecute, unto death,
my high-manteled old chimney. By what perverse magic, I a thousand times
think, does such a very autumnal old lady have such a very vernal young
soul? When I would remonstrate at times, she spins round on me with,
‘Oh, don’t you grumble, old man (she always calls me old man), it’s I,
young I, that keep you from stagnating.’ Well, I suppose it is so. Yea,
after all, these things are well ordered. My wife, as one of her poor
relations, good soul, intimates, is the salt of the earth, and none the
less the salt of my sea, which otherwise were unwholesome. She is its
monsoon, too, blowing a brisk gale over it, in the one steady direction
of my chimney.
Not insensible of her superior energies, my wife has frequently made me
propositions to take upon herself all the responsibilities of my
affairs. She is desirous that, domestically, I should abdicate; that,
renouncing further rule, like the venerable Charles V., I should retire
into some sort of monastery. But indeed, the chimney excepted, I have
little authority to lay down. By my wife’s ingenious application of the
principle that certain things belong of right to female jurisdiction, I
find myself, through my easy compliances, insensibly stripped by degrees
of one masculine prerogative after another. In a dream I go about my
fields, a sort of lazy, happy-go-lucky, good-for-nothing, loafing old
Lear. Only by some sudden revelation am I reminded who is over me; as
year before last, one day seeing in one corner of the premises fresh
deposits of mysterious boards and timbers, the oddity of the incident at
length begat serious meditation. ‘Wife,’ said I, ‘whose boards and
timbers are those I see near the orchard there? Do you know anything
about them, wife? Who put them there? You know I do not like the
neighbours to use my land that way; they should ask permission first.’
She regarded me with a pitying smile.
‘Why, old man, don’t you know I am building a new barn? Didn’t you know
that, old man?’
This is the poor old lady that was accusing me of tyrannising over her.
To return now to the chimney. Upon being assured of the futility of her
proposed hall, so long as the obstacle remained, for a time my wife was
for a modified project. But I could never exactly comprehend it. As far
as I could see through it, it seemed to involve the general idea of a
sort of irregular archway, or elbowed tunnel, which was to penetrate the
chimney at some convenient point under the staircase, and carefully
avoiding dangerous contact with the fireplaces, and particularly
steering clear of the great interior flue, was to conduct the
enterprising traveller from the front door all the way into the
dining-room in the remote rear of the mansion. Doubtless it was a bold
stroke of genius, that plan of hers, and so was Nero’s when he schemed
his grand canal through the Isthmus of Corinth. Nor will I take oath,
that, had her project been accomplished, then, by help of lights hung at
judicious intervals through the tunnel, some Belzoni or other might have
succeeded in future ages in penetrating through the masonry, and
actually emerging into the dining-room, and once there, it would have
been inhospitable treatment of such a traveller to have denied him a
recruiting meal.
- title
- Chunk 10