“If there wasn’t something wrong with him he wouldn’t be happy there,” insisted Julia.

Mr. Popham himself accounted for his contentment without insulting his intelligence.  “The way I look at it,” he said, “this world’s all the world we’ll git till we git to the next one; an’ we might’s well smile on it, ‘s frown!  You git your piece o’ life an’ you make what you can of it;—­that’s the idee!  Now the other day I got some nice soft wood that was prime for whittlin’; jest the right color an’ grain an’ all, an’ I started in to make a little statue o’ the Duke o’ Wellington.  Well, when I got to shapin’ him out, I found my piece o’ wood wouldn’t be long enough to give him his height; so I says, ’Well, I don’t care, I’ll cut the Duke right down and make Napoleon Bonaparte.’  I’d ‘a’ been all right if I’d cal’lated better, but I cut my block off too short, and I couldn’t make Napoleon nohow; so I says, ’Well, Isaac Watts was an awful short man, so I guess I’ll make him!’ But this time my wood split right in two.  Some men would ‘a’ been discouraged, but I wasn’t, not a mite; I jest said, ‘I never did fancy Ike Watts, an’ there’s one thing this blamed chip will make, an’ that’s a button for the barn door!’”

Osh not only whittled and papered and painted, but did anything whatsoever that needed to be done on the premises.  If the pump refused to draw water, or the sink drain was stopped, or the gutters needed cleaning, or the grass had to be mowed, he was the man ordained by Providence and his own versatility to do the work.  While he was papering the front hall the entire Carey family lived on the stairs between meals, fearful lest they should lose any incident, any anecdote, any story, any reminiscence that might fall from his lips.  Mrs. Carey took her mending basket and sat in the doorway, within ear shot, while Peter had all the scraps of paper and a small pasting board on the steps, where he conducted his private enterprises.

Osh would cut his length of paper, lay it flat on the board, and apply the wide brush up and down neatly while he began his story.  Sometimes if the tale were long and interesting the paste would dry, but in that case he went over the surface again.  At the precise moment of hanging, the flow of his eloquence stopped abruptly and his hearers had to wait until the piece was finished before they learned what finally became of Lyddy Brown after she drove her husband ou’ doors, or of Bill Harmon’s bull terrier, who set an entire community quarreling among themselves.  His racy accounts of Mrs. Popham’s pessimism, which had grown prodigiously from living in the house with his optimism; his anecdotes of Lallie Joy Popham, who was given to moods, having inherited portions of her father’s incurable hopefulness, and fragments of her mother’s ineradicable gloom,—­these were of a character that made the finishing of the hall a matter of profound unimportance.