The Wreck of the South Pole and Other Strange Tales — page 142: what you’re looking at

Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.

What Shall She Do? 135 a stranger in my own land, and after a brief visit to the remnants that were left of my family, I took the first train for a little hamlet in Ohio whither I proposed bring- ing my household gods and settling down to pass the remainder of my life in peace. It was a beautiful morning and I came upon the house in the early sunlight. It was built upon the colonial plan, with a mixture of Swede and Norwegian; the founder evidently had first built a square house of four rooms, with an immense hall running through it, and afterward added a hen coop here and a dormer window there, a lean-to on the left and a “T” on the right, until he had but to slope the roof down to the hillside and the house was complete. It may have been a model of architecture once, but it most assuredly was a first-class model of inconvenience and uncleanness then. The whole place was sadly neglected. The gate was broken, the fence demoralized, and the garden grown up with weeds. The orchard was wunpruned and the ground strewn with dead branches; the stable dilapidated and the fields barren. But none of these makes a house ghostly. There are three circum:tances under which a house will seem supernatural, but it must not be gone to ruin. On the contrary, a field of grain ready to cut, but with no reapers in it; a neat yard and a house in good order, with all the necessities of life in it, standing solitary and silent on a hot August day when the sunlight comes down in a shower of blinding rays—such a place will, in my CORnNIELOOOMKS (SO)