Читать книгу Superstition Corner онлайн

5 страница из 47

Old William Luck sat under the hedge of Dodyland Shaw, and watched the new house a-building. His master had cut the wood out of the shaw some time ago, and for years had kept it seasoning. He had always meant to build a new house when one of his sons should marry. Old Holly Crouch was falling down, though great beams propped its leaning frontage. It had been built in the same way as the new house, of oak and a plaster mixed of sand and clay, but it was thatched instead of tiled, and its great mossgrown hump of roof had so sagged and slumped over the beams that gable-end and roof-tree were lost in it together, a shapeless mass.

William Luck was sorry that the new house was to be roofed with tiles. Slab-castles, they were called, those little tiled houses that folk were building now, and sensible men made mock of them. Tiles were all very well for the gentry, for the Squire at Conster Manor or even for the Squire at Fuggesbroke, but they weighed down the beams of small houses, making walls bulge and rafters sag—and no one could say that tiles were snug, warm in winter and cool in summer, like thatch; nor were they so easily come by as thatch, which grows in the fields as part of the gift of corn.