The house at nowhere.

With a tangy orange juice, he picked up from the store nearby he sat under the shade of a big willow tree beside the lake. You could see the sun's rays sipping past the leaves that looked like spears of light. Admiring the warm heat waves, he remembered the lavish house he had just been by.??

It didn’t have an iron latch on the front door, nor a wooden one with a bucking string, but a brass knob to turn, the same as houses in town. There was a big fireplace that was bricked on the bottom, and the bricks were kept clean and red by pouring water on them and scrubbing them with another brick; sometimes they washed them over with red water paint that they call Spanish-brown. They had big brass dog irons that could hold up a saw log. There was a clock in the middle of the mantlepiece, with a picture of a town painted on the bottom half of the glass front, and a round place in the middle of it for the sun, and you could see the pendulum swing behind it.

It was beautiful to hear that clock tick; and sometimes when one of these peddlers had been along and scoured her up and got her in good shape, she would start in and strike a hundred and fifty before she got tuckered out. They wouldn’t take any money for her. Well, there was a big outlandish parrot on each side of the clock, made out of something like chalk, and painted up gaudy. By one of the parrots was a cat made of crockery, and a crockery dog by the other; and when you pressed down on them, they squeaked but didn’t open their mouths nor look different nor interested. They squeaked through underneath.?

On the table in the middle of the room was a kind of a lovely crockery basket that had apples and oranges and peaches and grapes piled up in it, which was much redder and yellower and prettier than real ones are, but they weren’t real because you could see where pieces had got chipped off and showed the white chalk, or whatever it was, underneath. This table had a cover made out of beautiful oilcloth, with a red and blue spread-eagle painted on it, and a painted border all around.