In my opinion every professional man should keep a chest of carpenters'
tools in his barn or shop, and busy himself at odd hours with them in
constructing the varied articles that are always needed about the house.
There is a great deal of pleasure in feeling your own independence of
other trades, and more especially of the carpenter. Every now and then
your wife will want a bracket put up in some corner or other, and with
your new, bright saw and glittering hammer you can put up one upon which
she can hang a cast-iron horse-blanket lambrequin, with inflexible water
lilies sewed in it.
A man will, if he tries, readily learn to do a great many such little
things and his wife will brag on him to other ladies, and they will make
invidious comparisons between their husbands who can't do anything of
that kind whatever, and you who are "so handy."
Firstly, you buy a set of amateur carpenter tools. You do not need to
say that you are an amateur. The dealer will find that out when you ask
him for an easy-running broad-ax or a green-gage plumb line. He will
sell you a set of amateur's tools that will be made of old sheet-iron
with basswood handles, and the saws will double up like a piece of
stovepipe.
After you have nailed a board on the fence successfully, you will very
naturally desire to do something much better, more difficult. You will
probably try to erect a parlor table or rustic settee.
I made a very handsome bracket last week, and I was naturally proud of
it. In fastening it together, if I hadn't inadvertently nailed it to the
barn floor, I guess I could have used it very well, but in tearing it
loose from the barn, so that the two could be used separately, I ruined
a bracket that was intended to serve as the base, as it were, of a
lambrequin which cost nine dollars, aside from the time expended on it.
During the month of March I built an ice-chest for this summer. It was
not handsome, but it was roomy, and would be very nice for the season of
1886, I thought. It worked pretty well through March and April, but as
the weather begins to warm up that ice-chest is about the warmest place
around the house. There is actually a glow of heat around that ice-chest
that I don't notice elsewhere. I've shown it to several personal
friends. They seem to think it is not built tightly enough for an
ice-chest. My brother looked at it yesterday, and said that his idea of
an ice-chest was that it ought to be tight enough at least to hold the
larger chunks of ice so that they would not escape through the pores
of the ice-box. He says he never built one, but that it stood to reason
that a refrigerator like that ought to be constructed so that it would
keep the cows out of it. You don't want to have a refrigerator that the
cattle can get through the cracks of and eat up your strawberries on
ice, he says.
A neighbor of mine who once built a hen resort of laths, and now wears a
thick thumbnail that looks like a Brazil nut as a memento of that pullet
corral, says my ice-chest is all right enough, only that it is not
suited to this climate. He thinks that along Behring's Strait, during
the holidays, my ice-chest would work like a charm. And even here, he
thought, if I could keep the fever out of my chest there would be less
pain.
I have made several other little articles of virtu this spring, to the
construction of which I have contributed a good deal of time and two
finger nails. I have also sawed into my leg two or three times. The leg,
of course, will get well, but the pantaloons will not. Parties wishing
to meet me in my studio during the morning hour will turn into the alley
between Eighth and Ninth streets, enter the third stable door on the
left, pass around behind my Gothic horse, and give the countersign and
three kicks on the door in an ordinary tone of voice.