The originating Plummer, Mrs Murchison
often said, must have been a person of large ideas, and
she hoped he had the money to live up to them. The
Murchisons at one time kept a cow in the barn, till a
succession of "girls" left on account of the milking,
and the lane was useful as an approach to the backyard
by the teams that brought the cordwood in the winter. It
was trying enough for a person with the instinct of order
to find herself surrounded by out-of-door circumstances
which she simply could not control but Mrs Murchison
often declared that she could put up with the grounds if
it had stopped there. It did not stop there. Though I
was compelled to introduce Mrs Murchison in the kitchen,
she had a drawing-room in which she might have received
the Lieutenant-Governor, with French windows and a
cut-glass chandelier, and a library with an Italian marble
mantelpiece. She had an icehouse and a wine cellar, and
a string of bells in the kitchen that connected with
every room in the house; it was a negligible misfortune
that not one of them was in order. She had far too much,
as she declared, for any one pair of hands and a growing
family, and if the ceiling was not dropping in the
drawing-room, the cornice was cracked in the library or
the gas was leaking in the dining-room, or the verandah
wanted reflooring if anyone coming to the house was not
to put his foot through it; and as to the barn, if it
was dropping to pieces it would just have to drop.
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