Page:Sheila and Others (1920).djvu/50

Rh I endeavor to dissemble my emotions, he follows up his advantage with further comment and advice.

"The chimbly ain't high enough—not fer a real good draft. Mebbe the bricks is fallin' in. You'd ought to hev' a bricklayer come and look it over."

"But Williams," I say firmly, recovering my stand, "Janet can bring that fire up in twenty minutes with just a good shaking down and clearing out. There is nothing wrong with the draft when she puts on a fire—not a suspicion of coal gas."

"Well, all I say is, git her to do it then," returns Williams with the weary air of one who has to do with unreasonable people.

If it isn't the pipes he falls back upon in self-defense, it is the obsolete manner in which the coils were put into the fire box—"any child u'd a' knowed better—" or the quality of the coal this year, or the wrong principle on which the intake was constructed. He is never at a loss and I confess I sometimes am, in the flood-tide of his eloquence, which of course tips the argument his way, and certainly does not conduce to the frequency of our interviews.