The House by Eugene Field — Read

Unless you want to render yourself liable to an attack of nervous prostration you should never watch a skilful workman nailing on lath. It is the most bewildering spectacle you can conceive of. I watched it for twenty minutes one day -- it was when they were lathing the big front room downstairs, the library, and my brain began to reel as if I were intoxicated. I actually believe that if Uncle Si had not led me away and set me down under one of the willow-trees in the front yard I should have had a spell of sickness, and may be even now had been confined in the incurable ward of a lunatic asylum. I can't understand how they do it so accurately and so fast and with such apparent ease. The whole proceeding is so fascinating that I really believe that, next to proficiency in the science of astronomy, I should like to be an expert at nailing lath. In every line of mechanics my education has been grievously neglected.

Alice says that I am not practical enough to make a successful carpenter; she gets this unfair opinion of me from an incident in our early wedded life which she delights in recalling in the presence of people upon whom I am particularly desirous of making a favorable impression. It seems that when Galileo and Herschel were little tots I undertook to construct a playhouse for them in the back yard. This was at a time when I was exceptionally busied with my professional studies; Mars was rapidly approaching perihelion, and I had been commissioned by the Blue Island Society of the Arts and Sciences to prepare a chart of the bottle-neck seas. It would have been surprising indeed had I not been preoccupied -- too absorbed in intellectual pursuits to cope successfully with any such worldly and prosaic thing as a playhouse in the back yard.